136. You Have To Believe The Story You're Selling feat. Neha Govindraj, CEO @ Bonside

I think the thing about fundraising is so much of it is storytelling and your ability to storytell, and you can really only storytell so much as you believe it. That really comes to life in fundraising for venture capital You have to believe the story that you're selling. And it's way too easy to sell the story that someone else wants to hear because you're probably a sharp person, can react quickly, can tell someone what they wanna hear, and the reality is it's just not gonna resonate unless you deeply, truly believe it. I think minimizing the reps of, okay, I'm gonna change my storyline and I'm gonna try this new pitch and I'm gonna try this. When you find yourself in that rut like spinning on how you're gonna pitch something or storytell something, just take a step back and actually just realign with your mission and your vision, and then think about the most compelling way to communicate that. And if that's different from where you started, great run with v2. If it's exactly with what you started with, then stick to your guns and keep pitching it and you'll find the right person that believes in it. When you're fundraising, you're going to get no's and I am someone that if I hear the word no, then I think about everything I could have done or said to make it a yes. I could be talking to a random person and accidentally pitch them and then they said, no, someone that I never even wanted capital from, and I will still go back and question, should I have story told that differently? Should I have thought about that differently? I don't know that that's the right answer. Like there's like, there's probably people that don't do that and that's probably very good for them. But I always took that as an opportunity of is there something to learn from this? Is there something that I'm not communicating clearly or could I have framed something differently to get you in the head space that I wanted you to be in? And sometimes the no is just because someone doesn't, they just don't see it and they just don't get it, or it just doesn't make sense to'em. That's totally fine. But It was really the dynamic between having a vision and storytelling that I really worked hard to keep close to one another so that I was always storytelling my vision not what someone else wanted to hear.