A VC explains how to pitch a compelling story that makes them want to invest

The following section is an excerpt from The Fundraising Blueprint by Abhishek Maran, focused on crafting your narrative and structuring your pitch deck.

Fundraising is an emotional process, especially at the early stage.

You need investors to feel a certain level of affinity towards you and your startup to stand a chance. Some people are natural born storytellers and others find it hard to understand what might entice someone to lean in further.

For those who find this difficult, having a systematic framework for communicating your startup is key.

It’ll help you break your startup into mini Lego pieces, ready to be built into a sky-scraping narrative. But first, we need to understand what the overarching narrative should look like, before getting into the nitty-gritty.

Simply put, startup pitches are a fine balance between logic and emotion. The easy trap to fall into is favouring one side over the other.

Some founders focus heavily on the numbers, optimising their market size slides, forecasting their revenue to a decimal point and over-engineering what their valuation should be. Other founders try to paint a grand vision without any substance at all.

The narrative arc you choose should map to your startup’s context.

Think of it as a spectrum: some businesses need more logical proof points, while others thrive on ambitious vision.

Let me illustrate with three examples:

New Market Creation

Imagine you’re building electric flying taxis. It’s a crazy, audacious goal filled with a bunch of roadblocks that will likely be existential. Investors will want to see the stepping stones that make the impossible possible. Your story should be grounded in concrete milestones: regulatory approvals, technological breakthroughs, and clear evidence of customer demand. The goal is to transform science fiction into an inevitable reality through logical progressions.

Competitive Market Disruption

Now consider building a recruiting marketplace in a space dominated by established players. Here, you need a different balance. Pure logic won’t differentiate you – LinkedIn already exists. Instead, your narrative needs to spark imagination while proving early momentum. Paint a picture of why the industry is ready for disruption, back it with evidence of early adopters choosing your solution, and demonstrate how you’ll expand from that beachhead. Your story needs to make investors feel the winds of change while showing them the compass pointing to success.

Paradigm Shift Play

Let’s say you’re building a new monetary system (i.e., cryptocurrency) where you’re not just creating a new market or disrupting an existing one – you’re proposing a fundamental shift in how society operates. Your narrative needs to tap into deeper cultural currents and zeitgeist: growing distrust in centralised platforms, desire for digital sovereignty, and the evolution of online identity. Early traction might not exist, so investors are entirely betting on your ability to catalyse a movement. Your story needs to make them believe they’re getting in on the ground floor of a once-in-a-generation shift in human behaviour and coordination.

These narrative archetypes provide a foundation, but you still need a systematic way to organise your story’s components. My favourite framework focuses on your startup’s Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility (DVF). This framework helps ensure your narrative is both emotionally compelling and logically sound.

As a side note, I find that the DVF framework is very versatile beyond just storytelling. I’ve personally found it useful in strategic and product roadmapping conversations. It’s a good way to go back to first principles and really think through the necessity and motivations of making a strategic move.

Here’s how to weave it together:

Set the Stage: Start with your vision and then lay out the context – market tailwinds (Desirability) and market size (Viability). This context-setting naturally flows from whichever narrative archetype you’ve chosen (new market creation, competitive disruption, or paradigm shift)
Define Your Go-To-Market: With the context established, identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and their buying patterns (Desirability). Your GTM strategy should align with your buyers – for example, if you’re targeting individual contributors within organisations, a product-led growth (PLG) approach might make sense
Connect GTM to Product: Your product features and architecture (Feasibility) should directly support your GTM strategy and business model
Prove It’s Working: Traction (Viability) validates your GTM, business model, and product bets. Strong traction gives you the credibility to double down on what’s working and justify scaling your team to build a better product or expand sales operations
Make the Ask: Be specific about the benchmarks you need to hit for your next round and the resources required to achieve them. Use these inputs to calculate your capital needs, including a buffer for contingencies

If you enjoyed the insights above, you can purchase The Fundraising Blueprint on Gumroad or Amazon.