1. Storytelling

You may be tempted to believe that investors invest with their brains. They gather all the information available about a company, the market, and the surrounding big picture, plug it all into a spreadsheet, and then decide whether to invest or not. That isn’t the case, for two closely related reasons. The first reason is that investors are human, and humans naturally love stories and narratives. Being able to paint a picture of the problem you’ve perceived, how you’re going to address that problem, and how the world is going to be different once the problem is solved is tapping into an emotional realm. Don’t get me wrong; your investors will still do their “due diligence” and plug all the numbers you give them into spreadsheets to see if the story works on that level. But you can’t skip the storytelling step: just handing someone a worksheet with all the numbers already filled in would only work for a vanishingly small subset of investors.