VC Minute – quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better.
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Brandon
If you’re just starting out and you’re looking to build a network and listen, mostly all of us have been there, especially those of us that exist outside the lines.
The best thing to do right now, in my opinion, is just put yourself out there.
Nobody knows what you’re doing if you don’t talk about it. You have to be your biggest fan. You have to be your biggest cheerleader.
Even people that are coming out of high school and going into college sports they make highlight reels. Put your highlight reel out there, talk about it all day, every single day. You’ll start to attract the right people. You get luckier with the more work that you put in.
But you have to put yourself out there. That’ll help you get a messaging market fit . You know, we all talk about product market fit, but messaging market fit is so important as well because are you reaching the right people who want to hear you speak? They’ll be there if you just put yourself out there and iterate on the message that you’re putting out there.
The messaging market fit is making sure that the right people are hearing your message, but that it also fits with their beliefs and what they want to hear.
So I go in front of the House Financial Services Committee and talk about how are we gonna get the debt to GDP ratio back within a good area. Here’s what Zinsu does. These founders that exist outside the lines can push forward innovation, which gets more productivity out of the entire country. It creates jobs in all these different places over the country. That’s how it helps them.
But my message to these founders is that, oh, you’re gonna help the GDP and you know, blah. They don’t care about that. You know what they care about? Am I gonna be able to get my dream to reality? My message to all of them is you belong here. You are a necessary part of the future that we’re all going to exist in. And so that’s how I talk with them.
So on Twitter, my message is different than the message I give in front of the House Financial Services Committee.
Some of us have a social mission that’s more important than the financial mission. That messaging may work for an angel investor that me messaging may work for Going to a CDFI, community development financial institution. But if you’re going to a VC, you have to give your messaging in the way of here’s how you are going to make a lot of money.
Understand your messaging and then have a message market fit and talk to them in the way that they want to be talked to.
But always keep your mission, vision, and values the same. That will guide the messaging that you give out at each individual level.
That’s when you start to find who the VCs are that you wanna work with, who the angel investors are that you wanna work with.
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