I explore this question in my short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
Your solution - the least important part of your pitch
|
When pitching to investors, spend as little time as possible talking about your solution. Sounds counterintuitive? Imagine this: Turns out this mom learned about the solution from another parent in the class, and almost all the parents are already using it with similar results! The best part? It only costs $7.99 a month. At this point, you are probably itching to sign up, even though I haven't told you what the thing IS. Is it an app? A book? A course? A gadget? Investors sift through dozens of pitches, where the solutions change but what they are attuned to remains the same - a sense of opportunity. There’ll be plenty of time later for them to dig into the details of your solution, but in this initial pitch, they are focused on 'markers of opportunity' like relevance or credibility. Your solution? It needs to be there as context but more than that - it becomes a distraction. P.S. |
Creativity in Deep-Tech
I explore this question in my short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
There's a way to improve your startup by orders of magnitude in 10 seconds.Here’s what you do:Go to your email signature and add this to your title: CVO, Chief Visionary Officer. (You can keep your CEO title or replace it — I don’t mind.)Boom! You just made your startup more effective and drastically increased your chances of building a great product.By assuming the CVO title, you made something explicit that most startups leave vague: that there is a single source of intent in the system....
Most deep-tech pitches are weak due to confusion about the relationship between facts and narrative.At best, people aren’t sure what a narrative is. At worst, they think facts and narrative are opposites — that narrative is something you use when your facts are lacking. A simple scenarioImagine you meet someone and they treat you kindly. You note it as a fact. You might conclude: “This person is a good person.” Then later, that same person treats you poorly. Another fact. Now you have two...
No one knows what investors are looking for Not even the investors themselves.If they did, the whole process would look very different. Investors would just ask for the specific information, compare the answers, and make decisions quickly. But the investment process in deep-tech is long, iterative, and deeply human.That’s not to say investors aren’t qualified. Seasoned investors absolutely know how to invest to achieve the outcomes they desire - but they can’t give you a formula.Knowing how...