After having spent 30 months and meeting with over 300 Founders and making over 40 Angel investments, it is my strong belief that while customer is the king and people make it happen, but the early-stage start-ups (at least up to Series A) need founders to be wonderful storytellers.
This feeling comes from the fact that storytellers get funders much more quickly compared to companies some of which have a great product and fair amount of customer traction but have sometimes struggled to raise money or are able to raise money at a relatively lower valuation because of their inability to share their story.
Long-term investors love story tellers, as they are able to see the positive energy and vibrations, aspiration, passion, purpose, clarity of thought and conviction around strategy, goals, execution capabilities in the story shared by founders.
At a tactical level, storytellers have no fear of losing, as they spend a fair amount of time to understand the potential investor’s needs, create a good perception about themselves and their business which may generally lead to aligning with the right partners which further leads to inbound interest and FOMO during the fund raise process. The art is to find the believer of the story that other investors follow. I must mention there is a bit of luck around the time it may take to find the believer, some who are lucky may get in less than a month and others may take many months.
I am sharing a framework which in my view could help founders in creating their story. I have merged the framework for building moats for start-ups (read more) and Ikigai framework to create a winning story.
Ikigai framework was created by some of the happiest people in a small village in Japan who also have the highest life longevity, I chose to use this framework for storytelling by linking this with Building Moats for start-ups framework, as one needs to learn from this framework to enjoy the journey of creating a start-up.
I hope this will be helpful to founders in their fund raise process.
September 2021
Further Reading:
* Framework for Building Moats for Start-Ups (Read More)
**Framework for Founders with regards to raising Series A / Series B (Read More)
Journey of Series-A Fund Raise by Anmol Singh Jaggi, Founder – BluSmart Mobility (Read More)
