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As a founder, your blurb is a core part of your fundraising tool kit. VCs are inundated with startups asking them for money so they aggressively triage their time. Whether or not you get a warm intro or you send them a cold email, investors use your blurb to decide whether it’s worth even looking at your deck and then they use the deck to decide whether to take a call. This post is a step by step guide to making one compelling enough to land you first calls with VCs.
Your blurb is supposed to be a punchy intro to your startup. Like I mentioned, the goal isn't to get VCs to invest right away, but rather to get them intrigued enough to take a call with you. Investors try hard to avoid 'wasting' 30 minutes with a company they would never invest in. Consequently, when reading a blurb they try to understand three things:
When I worked as a VC, I used a three part structure to help portfolio companies write blurbs that took advantage of the investor behaviour described above. Below is an overview of the structure, as well as an example constructed using it. The rest of a post is a guide to adapting the structure for your own startup.
The structure’s three parts are as follows:
The result is a paragraph that looks like the below - which can be wrapped in a personalised cold email or sent by someone making an intro for you.
Let’s dive into how we make each part.
Your aim is to describe what your startup does in as clear terms as possible. If an investor doesn't understand what your company does they can't get excited about it and if they are not excited, they won't take the call.
Many founders have blurbs that don’t help investors understand their businesses. Common problems include:
Let's break these errors down.
Marketing speak is the type of language you see in ads and corporate branding. Here’s an example:
“MealCo is on a mission to revolutionise the food industry”
When you describe your startup like this you sound sexy but you run a huge risk that the reader remains in the dark about what you actually do.
MealCo could be doing anything! Who are they selling to? What are they selling? How does it work? These questions are left wide open by this approach, depriving the investor of the detail necessary to get excited.
Sometimes founders describe their businesses using terminology and concepts that only people from their industry understand. Doing this causes the same problems as too much marketing speak. Here’s an example:
"We use zero knowledge proofs to solve the travelling salesman problem for logistics companies"
Most VCs are not specialists in your sector, therefore you should assume that they won't understand technical terms you put in your blurb. Sure they could Google them, but they have 50 other companies to look at. Plain language like "our software helps people figure out the most time efficient route when they are travelling between multiple locations" is much more likely to land you a call than "our software solves the travelling salesman problem".
There are two approaches to describing businesses that I've seen work consistently. Analogy (“we are Airbnb for X”) and what I call “X for Y” descriptions. Analogy is very powerful, but is often misused by founders. X for Y descriptions work consistently and carry none of the risks of an analogy that doesn't quite land. So we're going to walk through this method.
An X for Y description is where you explain your startup by stating what it sells (X) and who (Y) it sells it to. In a blurb, I like to make these descriptions pop by following up with an explanation of why providing X is good for the users (Y). This approach to description is succinct and should take no more than two sentences. When crafting them for blurbs I use the two part structure below.
Here’s more detail on how to construct each part.
At its core, every company provides some type of product / service (the what / the X) to some group of customers (the who / the Y). The essence of most businesses can be captured with just these two things:
You can leverage this fact to describe your own startup. Simply state in the plainest possible language what service / product you're offering and who you plan to offer it to.
When explaining 'what' your product is, it's important to be sufficiently detailed. Statements like "we sell software to the automotive industry" without any attempt to explain the type of software are too vague. Moreover the reader isn't provided with any sense of the desire being met by what you're doing. To avoid vagueness:
Similarly, when explaining 'who' the user / customer is, be specific. "We sell Product X to the sales teams of Fortune 500 companies” is better than "We sell Product X to Fortune 500 companies" the former gives the reader a better picture of who you are building for.
One thing to remember is that the complete truth isn't necessarily your friend. You need to balance the need to be specific enough for someone to grasp the shape of your business with the need to produce something that's two sentences or shorter. Packing in every nuance is impossible, you have to prioritise. It's better to tell 80% of your story and be clear, than 100% of the story and confusing. If 95% of your customers are in the restaurant industry and 5% are supermarkets it's okay to say that your business sells to restaurants and leave out the supermarket part.
Getting VCs to grasp what you are doing is the first step towards the real goal, getting them excited enough to take a call with you. Your 'core' statement is unlikely to be able to generate excitement on its own. So to get investors' blood flowing, it helps to immediately follow your X for Y description with some colour on why what you have built matters to your users. Doing so provides an implicit argument in favour of your startup succeeding - if it seems like you are providing customers a lot of value, it's easy for VCs to believe that you will get traction with them.
Your job is to show how your product benefits the users it serves. When doing this, remember to frame the benefits in a way that VCs will understand and find significant. Writing something like "our product makes the procurement process much easier for purchasing teams at construction firms'', doesn’t quite nail this. Your average VC will have no idea how difficult these teams find procurement, nor how much easier your product makes it - framed like this it's too abstract to excite anyone.
To frame a benefit correctly you need to
Regarding the first point, here are some benefit narratives that consistently work with VCs:
Instead of stopping after describing what the user is able to do with your product, tack on a sentence explaining how what they are now able to do satisfies one of the narratives above - and quantify it. Transform "our software makes things easier for procurement teams" into "our software makes things easier for procurement teams by saving the average purchasing team member 10 hours a week". The latter feels valuable to me and I've never procured anything.
Institutional VCs don’t invest based on vibes - they have criteria that the startups they back must satisfy. The investors who receive your blurb try to figure out as quickly as possible if your startup has a chance of meeting their criteria. If they aren’t sure this often results in a quick rejection without further investigation. The good news is that the inverse is also true - if your blurb shows clearly that you meet VC criteria, getting a first call becomes easier and quicker. Our aim with our blurb is to weaponize this by tailoring our blurb to meet VCs’ requirements - all we need to know is what they are.
Most venture funds make memos to support their investment decisions. These are structured documents where they list their investment criteria and assess how a startup matches up versus it (p.s. you get a free example investor memo when you subscribe to our newsletter). To figure out what the most important VC criteria are, I surveyed ~20 of them about what they included in these memos. The core finding was that every single fund had sections dedicated to Product, Market Size and Team.
What do VCs want to see when assessing these three areas?
Now that we know what VCs want, we can use our blurb to show that we are exactly what they're looking for. On Product there isn’t much to do. I you used the “X for Y” structure above then you will have already explained what your product is and made it believable that users want it by explicitly outlining the benefits they get by using it. Market Size and Team on the other hand have yet to be addressed. As a result, I tend to devote one sentence of a blurb to each of these. Let’s walk through how to make these two sentences as compelling as possible.
I have a written number of posts on market sizing covering what investors are looking for, how to convincingly make your number larger, and how to get investors to believe the market size story you tell. In a blurb, however, there’s not enough room to be comprehensive, instead the aim is to succinctly:
As long as you have done a bottoms up market size calculation you have all the information you need (if you don’t know how to make a bottoms up analysis check out this post). You simply need to fill out the placeholders in the model sentence below.
“With <# Potential Customers> <Potential Customer Segment> this represents <# Market Size> revenue opportunity”
Let’s walk through what these placeholders represent.
# Market Size: This is the amount of revenue there is to be made in your market (e.g. $10bn) - it is literally the end result of your bottoms up calculation. Your goal is to convince the VC that you’re in a big enough market so the clearest way to do this is to literally tell them how big you think it is.
Potential Customer Segment: This represents the types of users / businesses that might potentially buy your product. It is the number of potential customers that you multiply by revenue per customer to calculate your market size number. It could be anything from a type of individual to a type of company or even a type of employee or team within a company. Here are some examples of Potential Customer Segments - “doctors”, “sales people at Fortune 500 companies”, and “compliance teams”.
# Potential Customers: The number of people / entities included in your Potential Customer Segment.
Once you fill in the placeholders you end up with a sentence that looks something like this:
“With 2m lawyers in Europe and the US this represents a $4bn revenue opportunity”
Making a compelling sentence about your team can be challenging. So I use the following structure to cover all bases.
“The team consists of <Person 1 + Background>,..., and <Person N + Background>”
As you can see the placeholders require you to mention some team members and to describe each of your backgrounds. The first job is relatively easy - select the people you want to mention (typically the founders) - the real difficulty is framing your backgrounds in a way that’s compelling to VCs.
For each team member, start by determining the level of effort you need to put into selling their backstory. If the selected person worked at institutions that VCs recognise or has a prestigious job title, they are on what I call ‘Easy Track’, the rest are on ‘Hard Track’.
When describing someone on Easy Track you simply:
The result, “Tunde who was the former CTO of PayPal”, is more than enough. Paypal’s prestige is able to do the heavy lifting with investors.
For Hard Track employees you need to make VCs feel 1) that the institutions your team members previously worked for are impressive and 2) that their roles were difficult, important or senior. I construct descriptions that do this consistently using the following five steps:
If you put all these elements together. You get the following:
“Our team consists of Tunde Adekeye who was part of the strategy team at infarm (an agricultural tech unicorn) where he worked on the $100m Series B fundraise”
Do this for all the employees you selected and you have your sentence.
Highlights are the simplest part of the blurb to make work. There is no need for a specialised sentence structure like the ones we have above. Instead you simply need to introduce the fact that you are about to list some highlights and then provide three to five of them in bullet point form.
The first part of this, Introducing the fact you’re about to provide a list of highlights, can be done easily with a sentence like this - “Here are a few highlights about the business:..”.
The real challenge, however, is in choosing what to mention out of the unlimited number of things you could include. My advice is to focus on highlights that provide a strong message that your business is actually working. I recognise that this is vague, so I suggest focusing on key points from the list below of things that typically excite VCs, which I adapted from NFX's excellent ‘Ladder or Proof’).
Now that we know what types of highlights to include, here are two final tips on making them ‘pop’.
Put all three of these elements (Company Description + Market Size & Team Sentences + Highlights) together and you now have a blurb designed to resonate with venture investors. There’s not much more need for a conclusion than that. Good luck!
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