How To Tell Startup Investors a Winning Growth Story

Everyone loves a good story. Make sure yours hits all the right notes.

Think about your investor pitch for a minute. Does it tell a compelling and believable story, one in which good ultimately vanquishes evil? Is your hero relatable and your enemy hateable? Does the end of your pitch deserve a standing ovation?

Those questions aren’t as silly as they seem.

From the first slide of your deck to the last, your startup should be the protagonist in a tale of rebellion against an entrenched empire. The antagonist is the problem you’re attempting to solve, with all of its dark-side pain and frustration neatly translated to time and dollars.

The rest of the deck covers your battle plan, your ragtag army, your innovative new weapons, and exactly how you’re going to navigate the trenches to take out the space station by firing a couple of torpedos into a shaft no bigger than two meters.

Here’s the thing: While a story-driven startup is a recent trend that aims to push all the right psychological investor buttons, unlike some of the more iconic stories we’re all familiar with, you can’t just hide the science and the data behind futuristic terms and emotional twists.

Even when you can tell an Oscar-worthy growth story to investors, you need the calculus to explain exactly how a couple of magic, glowing rocks will find an unprotected target that can cause a chain reaction that destroys a planet-sized fortress.

In other words, you have to explain, in detail, exactly how the Force works.

This is because a good story means success in the market, while good calculus proves your theorem. For your business model and your pitch to succeed, you need to nail both.

Let’s talk about how to do that.

But first: A word about the connection-driven pitch

It is no secret that whether your pitch is story-driven or calculus-driven, the easiest way to land an investor is either through an existing relationship or by springboarding off of a prior success.