Getting your start-up funded is not an easy task to do but certainly not an impossible one. However, many fail not because of the lack of business innovation but because they fall short when telling their story. Investors come across an endless number of pitch decks, emails or articles and often they never make it to the end of the first page.
Therefore, to tell your story in a concise and captivating way takes skill and is often the one that helps you get that fat funding you need.
Patricia Jamelska is a London based professional with international experience that has been working in the deep-tech space for a few years now and despite her young age, she has managed to secure a number of well-funded projects under her belt. She claims that one of the reasons for her success is the ability to tell the story.
‘’ I think a language is an art form and many of us overlook it. We often use it just as a basic tool of our everyday life and forget how much more we could get out of it. Once you start looking at it differently, you can utilize it for business growth and unlocking new opportunities’’
Nowadays, we are flooded by the amount of content that we are no longer able to process, and many have gone down the route of ‘the louder and brighter the better’ however, Patricia doesn’t think it’s the only way.
‘’I think being loud is a good start and it certainly captures the attention, but if you want to get your business or project funded, it is not enough to capture the attention of an investor for a couple of seconds. If the message doesn’t have any substance its shelf life is extremely short and will be soon replaced by a louder and brighter message. You need to think of the ways to capture the attention so in a week time the person still remembers you and that’s mostly done by what you said’’.
She wrote and worked on a number of deep-tech innovative projects and moved around the world working in the UK, Silicon Valley or Singapore where she learned the importance of tailoring the message to your audience taking into consideration demographical background, interests or even personal characteristics. Patricia has learned over the years that despite being in a tech-focused world, writing large projects and tenders for companies and governments doesn’t have to be rigid and tedious paperwork, in contrary, Patricia says one of the most important things is to remember that on the other side of the table, email or submission sits a person who wants to be entertained when reading the proposal.
Therefore, even in most technical proposals, Patricia believes there is room for creativity and if done properly that’s usually what differentiates the winning projects from the losing ones.
‘’Of course, I always keep the professional language as you can’t really submit multi-million dollar projects using slang words, but the person on the other side is unlikely to be captured by encyclopaedia-like articles. Most likely they will not make it to the end of the page. The secret is presenting the current capabilities while outlining the potential. And most importantly, the achievable potential. That’s where usually people get interested’’
Copywriting has until now been considered a boring skill of bookworms and not something you would brag about. But in a world full of buzz and chaos, you may soon realize the choice of the right words can open the doors to an endless number of million dollar opportunities.
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