I mentioned at the end of my last letter that we’re looking for funding. I mentioned at the beginning that we’d written and rewritten the narrative to get there. Boy'o'boy was that an understatement. It was a long process, with an ultimately good result. 

I doubt we’re done though. We’re probably 80 - 90% of the way to the final version. Still, I want to take some time to reflect on the process and see if I can’t tease out some lessons.

(Spoiler from Rhys editing this paragraph - I didn’t need to tease them out. See if you can spot them as you read.)

What happened

It was a couple months after I first started working with AWARE™. We knew we were going to raise a seed round and we needed a pitch deck. We had a version of a sales presentation, built in figma, but it wasn’t that great. So I waded into the weeds and got iterating. 

I like to think I’m a fair hand at writing, at turning a phrase, so I started editing. 

I’ve made pitch decks before, I’ve written more ‘pitch-y’ website copy than I care to remember, and so I started advising too. 

We should use less words here. We should have an image here. This message isn’t clear. That message is good but too complex. That kind of things.  

Really I was unconsciously reciting some ‘pitch deck best practices’ I’ve read too many times. 

We got something, and then of course we started looking at successful presentations. AirBnB, Uber, Notion, etc. Presentations that weren’t flashy but they raised. 

‘Ah.’ We thought, nodding knowingly, ‘this is how it’s done.’ We kept what we had in mind and started with a blank presentation.

We cut more words, honed in on one or two sentences we liked and more or less copied the structure. This was good, it forced us to think more deeply about what we were writing. ‘So what?’ became our favourite question. ‘This is a good line: “producers are cheated”’ someone would say, ‘So what?’ Someone would answer. And we would all nod, iterate, and iterate. 

After a while it started to look like a pitch deck. We had good, catchy words, we were talking about a problem our users would understand and we had relevant numbers. 

But like our inspirations it looked like it was out of the 2010s. Fortunately we had an experienced designer close by. We pulled him in and they quickly made it look much cleaner. And they're angel investor themselves so they had their own feedback for us. 

They ran us through a quick ‘what’s the message’ workshop so they could get up to speed. In doing this we honed in again on things we were missing. We argued about what was the most important message to get across, we wrote it all down, the designer contributed, designed, and bam - Friday evening, we had a presentation. 

It smelt good. It looked good. 

Monday morning, it was missing things. We had to change things. 

For something else, but related, I was doing a user focused messaging workshop to prioritise the core problems AWARE™ is addressing for its actual users. This was helpful, we had four very clear problems, and four very clear solutions. I brought this to the table, we worked it in. Later, we realised, it was missing something. 

I think by now you can see the pattern. 

We got feedback that it was over designed. We rolled it back, then weren’t happy with the under-design. 

We got feedback that it wasn’t punchy enough, not confident enough. Then we got the feedback that it wasn’t specific enough. Too vague. 

We shouldn’t talk about regulation at all. It should discuss the opportunity. No, it should be about the problem and the solution. It should definitely mention regulation. 

‘Those are great numbers!’ from one person,  ‘You’re missing numbers’ from another. 

‘You should send this out without giving all the numbers’. ‘You should send this out with all the numbers attached.’ 

‘This is one of the best pitch decks I’ve seen.’, ‘This deck is doing nothing for me.’ 

I could go on. 

Oof. 

As the time went by it didn’t feel like chaos. It felt like a lot of work, of course, it felt like it was taking a lot of time, sure, but every piece of feedback, every iteration, felt like progress. It was progress 

Now, like I said at the beginning, we’re probably not done yet so I’m not going to draw this process to an end yet, but I do think we’re at enough of a conclusion to be able to reflect. 

Problems in that process

Let’s do a diagnostic shall we. What was the problem? I’ll just use the first paragraph of the ‘what happened’ section and we’ll see what we can find. 

Boarding a moving plane

“A couple months after I first started working with AWARE™. We knew we were going to raise a seed round”

Perhaps I can forgive myself for this one more than the rest. You know the best way to board a moving plane?

Don’t. Wait for that sucker to land. 

The problem here was I tried to join an already moving process without waiting for it to stop, or even slow down. This meant I was basing all of my contributions on assumptions. I assumed the people working on it knew more than they did, I assumed I was just here to cross i-s and dot t-s. I assumed. I assumed I could board a moving plane. 

Starting in the middle

“we needed a pitch deck.”

A good friend told me yesterday, who literally lectures about Design Thinking, that you’re doing it wrong if you start with an idea. You have to start with problems and questions, not solutions. 

A pitch deck is a solution to the problem of articulating a message clearly. You have to start with being able to articulate a message clearly, not a pitch deck. 

I went straight into pitch deck territory before really defining who we were speaking to (target audience), what we wanted them to do (goals),  what were their core problems (problem statements) etc. Bad Rhys. 

A fool with a tool is still a fool

“We had a version of a sales presentation, built in figma” 

This one causes me the most shame - how often have I lectured people about finding the simplest possible route. If you asked anyone what’s the simplest way to make a pitch deck nobody, and I surely mean nobody would say to start in figma with a sales deck. 

It’s just a stupid thing to do and I’m embarrassed I didn’t realise until it was too late. 

This later created a dependency on a designer (not their fault, we were using figma before the designer came along …) because they had the best Figma skills, it meant it wasn’t easy to make small changes, version control got messy, and suddenly the things we were making we closer to polished designs than a presentation. 

Forrest for the trees. 

“So I waded into the weeds and got iterating.”

To be fair to myself, I thought I saw the forest. But to be honest with myself, I was just standing amongst lots of small trees. What was it my dad said and wrote on my window pane: ‘Perfect planning prevents piss poor performance.’ And what’s the quote: ‘fail to plan and plan to fail.’ 

There’s a lot of wisdom in these words, wisdom I flagrantly forgot. 

This one stings. By just getting stuck in and running to get up to speed I was able to contribute quickly, but not as well as I should have.  

What we can learn

The worst thing about writing something like this is realising I should have known better. These are almost all things I’ve written about before, certainly things I’ve talked about before, and some things I’ve even advised on before. 

Maybe this time I’ll learn ay? 

All of those issues I pulled out of one paragraph of what I described. I’m certain there are many more. But those are the big ones. Spoiler, they all relate to a favourite saying: Don’t just do something, stand there.

The answer is to not do those things. But what does that mean - what’s the action?

Get the plane to land

‘Please wait until the train has come to a complete stop before stepping onto the platform.’

Action: even if you think you don’t need it, even if you think it’s a waste of time and you already understand everything, ask someone to onboard you. 

Ask someone to slow down, take you back to the beginning and take the time to get up to speed. 

Even if it turns out you did know everything already it’s a helpful refresher, but more likely, you’ll have new and better context.

Start at the beginning

Duh. 

If someone is asking you to join a process in the middle, take a moment, think about the process you’re about to enter, and go back to the beginning. Similar to the last one, if I’d asked someone to take me to the start of the process I would have realised they’d started in the middle. 

I would have been able to see that the first things we should be doing is asking questions and identifying problems, not coming up with cool one-liners. 

F1 drivers don’t drive to the track in a race car. 

Perhaps we could have used figma effectively for making a pitch deck … if we were well versed figma users. I have working knowledge. I've designed in it before and worked with exceptional designers who use it like magic, but I’m not proficient enough to use it for something complex, and definitely not proficient enough to use it for something important. 

What’s that other phrase: ‘a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail’. Yea, we were men with figma seeing everything as a damn digital canvas. 

What would have been the simplest alternative? Well we could have started with a whiteboard, or a piece of paperm and graduated to google slides and never left. Woof. 

Don’t just do something, stand there for goodness sake!!!!

Before you just dive in, take a breath, think about how to do something before you just do. 

Outro

Anyway. Saying all this, we did get somewhere. Somewhere good. 

We felt confident enough to send it out and start socialising our pitch with investors. The benefit of  a long, clunky process like this is you really know the story back to front, because you had to refine it so many times. 

Fortunately, none of the above affected our taste. We knew what good looked like, we just had a hard time getting there. 

So, if you’ve read this far, I salute you, but also, get in touch. I’d be glad to share the presentation with you. Or, more appropriately, if you know investors, let me know, I have a hard won presentation to give them.