Fundraising is storytelling.

It’s not, as much as we wish, a reflection of the strength of the company.

If it was, Elizabeth Holmes would just be a failed entrepreneur working out of coffee shops instead of in jail.

But since she was excellent at storytelling, she raised $700m without a product.

It’s a cautionary tale, but if you’re messed up in the head like a storyteller like me, also an inspiring one.

Because if you can tell a great story - that’s also accurate, honest, and authentic 😇 - you can raise capital.

Telling your own story is… hard

The problem for most entrepreneurs is they’re so deep in the weeds of their company, they can’t tell a story that resonates with the crowd. They see their company through their eyes, not the investors.

After years of pouring their lives into their startup, they have biases.

Often…

• what they think is important isn’t what’s important to investors
• What they think is obvious is unclear
• What they think is interesting puts people to sleep.

Often we’ll meet with a client who has a script written up for their pitch video and they asks us what we think. And there’s always some great stuff in there, but 99% of the time, it’s a script that would never work on a crowdfunding platform.

Just today I received a 900-word script from a client who wanted to write it on their own, which is more than double the sweet spot for a crowdfunding script (this article is just 477 words, which is plenty of time to make my case).

If we’re going to get people to invest, we need to meet them where we are.

The best fundraising stories are a collaboration

The point of all this is to say - there’s tremendous value in working with someone outside the company to help tell your fundraising story. The key word there is help. Storytelling is a collaborative process.

In a collaborative storytelling process, the founder’s job is to:

• Share your why and your founding story
• Share your passion
• Share everything there is to know about the company

And the storyteller’s job is to

• Identify the most important parts of the company (not always what the founders think)
• Remove anything non-essential
• Turn that into story that is emotionally gripping and logically compelling

When these two things come together, we get incredible results that help founders raise millions. [insert links]

At Rally On, we’ve helped tell the stories of startups in every industry, stories, from CPG to Medtech to Finance and more. Our specialist expertise comes from being generalists. We approach each company with a beginner’s mind, so we can see it like an investor, and then we work with our clients to build from there.

And our clients have raised over $150M, so something seems to be working!

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