This post is in the series of how to create an awesome pitchdeck for your startup.  This post is part 2 of 5 in which I explain the need for explaining your MISSION and VISION. In simple words “WHO ARE YOU TRYING to save?” AKA Your SOLUTION.

In the previous blog we covered the importance of “THE CHARACTER” where you THE FOUNDER need to describe yourself, your expertise, knowledge, connections, passion, vision and everything possible to make yourself shine and prove that you are the prime and right candidate to do The JOB, to LEAD The project and to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Now that we have found our hero, we need to mix it with your MISSION.  Here is where you have to explain “WHO ARE YOU SAVING?”.   Are you forcing the granny to cross the road? Are you building a bridge where there is no traffic in the hope that one day it will open up the way and traffic will go through it? Or are you fixing the potholes in a road that is crossed by a million people per day.   

In the first example, we obviously exaggerate but it helps us to see that you are doing something in vain against the wishes and the need of the customer.   In the second example you are doing something in the hope of a future use however you will need to prove the future use, demand with a possible expression of desire from the market and the final example you are fixing an obvious problem.  The potholes that affects millions of users per day and yet no one has bothered to fix it so far.

Think about the above examples and see how your solution relates to the above and then try to answer it from an investment point of view.  Will an investor risk his hard earned cash (Assuming that most people earn their money through work and only a few have won the lottery) on a project that seems to be providing a service that has no market demand? Or a product that for the moment has no use or client but one day may have use. Is there data to support this future use and if so what is the expected numbers and results? How long is the investor willing to WAIT FOR YOU TO SAVE the princess and bring her back with the sacs of gold. Or put simply how long will the investor have to wait to get their return on investment.  2, 5, or 10 years?

YOUR MISSION, your objective must resonate to your audience.  You must be clear to whom you are pitching and what their window is for Return On Investment (ROI).  Short term ROI of 2 to 5 years suits most Business Angels and most will be willing to sit it out, 10 years is rather far stretched and not for all.  Will someone in their 70s think of a 10 year investment! They might be well dead before that or even if you do give them a good return, will they really benefit from it?  However for someone in their 20s, 30s or 40s, a 10 year wait might not seem that long and for VCs it is roughly the basic expectation.   In my endeavour of fund raising, I approached many people in my network, many who were wealthy and High Networth Individuals (HNWI), however I had a 10 year vision and most of these HNWIs were in their 60s to70s with a ROI window of 3 to 5.  They could sit back, enjoy life and not worry about money until death.  The only reason they would gamble on my MISSION would be if they could get a quick return.

Make sure that you tailor your objective to your audience.  It is no use reading Shakespeare to 5 years olds no matter how interesting and reading Donald Duck to 30 or 40 year olds.

You may ask why am I mixing THE MISSION with the AUDIENCE! The answer is simple because your mission has to resonate to your audience at all times.  You can still be a HERO and they will still admire you for what you set out to do, however they will not be the ones sitting and waiting for you to come back from the battle.  As well as tackling the AUDIENCE you will have noticed that in this blog, I have additionally touched based on THE WHY, simply because a story is not separate boxes of information but a continuous, interconnected and tangled web of connected information.  This is why PITCH DECKS are boring and disconnected sets of information and need to be converted back into the story.  In the next blog we will discuss the WHY in more details.

Feeling overwhelmed by all this and thinking that how are you going to get this down with all the other work you have to do as the Founder? Don’t worry. I help Founders, Startups, Incubators and Accelerators just with these type of things.  Whether you would like a private session for yourself, outsourcing the work completely so that you can dedicate your time to sales and development of your product or a masterclass for all your startups in your incubator / accelerator. Book a FREE 30 minute call with me or simply send me a message and we can explore the options of how I can help you.