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Rules of Storytelling for Fundraising (nfx.com)
116 points by domrdy on July 9, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



These are excellent points and can be summarized into: Why are you here and how did you get here? Where are you going? How do you plan to get there? - With that in mind, of all of the points they make, the most important one IMO is point #4.

Point #4 is so important, and I feel like a lot of people lose because of this one. Sometimes you'll say something in the "how do you plan to get there part", and then you'll really want to delve down into why, this smart cool thing you've figured out. You don't need to. If they ask why, tell them, if they don't, just tell the story. If they ask why, do not get into crazy detail or operations stuff, partly because you're probably wrong, partly because to some degree you'll be held to it, partly because there is a high chance you'll introduce confusion/disagreement. I cannot say this enough, do whatever you can to stay out of the weeds, if you're pushed, tell them you'll email them later with the details, make a note, email them later with the details.


There's a good episode of Metrics That Measure Up where Bill Reichert (Garage Technology Ventures) covers this - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/metrics-that-measure-u...


Note: Garage was founded by Guy Kawasaki, the first Apple (tech) evangelist, and an expert on how to present.


This gave me lots to think about. Lists like these are a great resource to return to. Besides CEOs product owners could also read this because making any product needs a story, or the sales department also needs stories. Learning more about stories will only help you.


I just went through making a deck for my startup and it's really hard to not want to say everything on your mind and why your startup is so great.

It is a constant process of tweaking copy, redoing graphics, trying to distill your idea into small bite-sized chunks.


super astute in pointing out there is the initial decision maker, and then the internal sell: associate->vc->partners->due dil

Something this misses, in both cases, much of the initial yes / no is often in the first minutes. it hints at it w putting best stuff first, so worth being explicit on that. Ex: "Amazing factoid about us X, like 100K people are using us to shine their shoes 100X faster!". That makes the rest of the story draw them in further, and should grow that: more excitement + less fear. Otherwise, you've lost them before minute 5, and they will likely only get more agitated & distracted as you go on.


Storytelling is for movies..

For maximum conversion fundraising you need a rat inside the VC firm so that you can retroactively put together a startup which ticks all the boxes of whatever thing is on the minds of the decision makers at the VC firm.

Any other tactic is being thrown at founders by gurus who either got lucky using said tactic and now think they discovered fire or even worse some mumbo-jumbo.




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