Making Your Startup Attractive to Investors with Danny Matthews
In this Founder Institute webinar, Danny Matthews (founder of Short Story Ventures and FI London director) explains how startups can become more attractive to investors by building a fundable brand. He argues that beyond the usual logical criteria (traction, market size), investors subconsciously look for a compelling brand story and a strong first impression, which are reflected in slide design and overall messaging. Matthews outlines four essential characteristics of a fundable startup brand: (1) an aligned origin, vision, and mission; (2) a compelling brand story told from the customer's perspective; (3) traction defined as data plus a concrete customer promise (e.g., pre‑orders, waiting‑list sign‑ups); and (4) a great first impression that can be communicated in a few clear words or visuals. He warns against common branding mistakes such as neglecting the origin story, using "we" language instead of "you" language, and treating branding as merely visual design. Throughout the talk he shares practical tactics—changing slide language to a "you" focus, using short‑form storytelling (ordinary world vs. new world), and iterating brand elements in sprint‑like cycles. Real‑world case studies (Solo60, Lazy Environmentalist, VideoWorks) illustrate how strong branding can secure funding or early revenue even before a product is built. The Q&A segment addresses specific founder concerns: pitching industrial solutions, creating recurring revenue, determining how niche a market can be, testing demand before building, and deciding how many paying MVP users are needed to justify further development. Matthews emphasizes problem‑obsessed, solution‑agnostic research, bootstrapping with intent, and the importance of early customer validation.
Chapters
What investors are actually looking for on a subconscious level, from that emotional, like, 50% of the brain point of view, what they're actually looking for is a compelling brand story. And I realize that's not design, but I'm getting there. So a compelling brand story and a great first impression. Now, I'll also back this up with the fact that we have mentors and VCs and investors come to our Founder Institute sessions every single week. And I guarantee you that 30 to 60% of them, when they give feedback to founders about their pitch, will comment on how their slides look. So even though it wouldn't be the answer to the question if you ask them, "What's the most important thing?" it's clearly very important to them because they comment on it every single pitch. There has never ever in the history of human life been a better time to start a business. There is an abundance of problems to solve and just not enough people solving them, in all honesty. You know, you just look around, you can see it on the news, you can see it on the internet, online. There's so many problems out there that need solving. No one is going to do it if it's not entrepreneurs and founders who are going out there and trying to solve bigger problems. So I want to encourage you to take this time to take risks. One of the big reasons that I started to go really deep into startups and very early-stage startups specifically is because I remember when this happened, when what is going on in the world happened before in 2008 and what came out of that. History just repeats itself. I'm really excited. No matter what anyone says about the economy or how things are or whatever it might be, the funding landscape, I don't think there's been a better time to start a business. You can do it faster, you can do it better, you can do it better looking. There's so much opportunity and I fail to see the downsides to this right now. So I want to share a few things with you. I want to give you a bit of an introduction into building a fundable startup brand and what that means. So I want to tell— I want to give you some information that will teach you how to create a brand that investors want to fund. Also how to avoid some of the mistakes that a lot of founders make and hopefully get you a little bit closer to traction or funding depending on what your goal is. So a couple of things I'm going to go through today is the importance of branding for startups, and some of you who may be— this may be your first venture, this might be a brand new concept for you, so hopefully I'll be catching you early and wouldn't have to unteach you some things. You know, I always think it's really difficult to unlearn some some of the habits and some of the things that we learned along the way that might not be relevant now. So hopefully I'll be helping you figure this thing out. Also, the characteristics of a fundable startup brand, really important. I believe there's 4 things. And common branding mistakes by founders. And I will share with you the exact 4 things you need to become attractive to VCs and investors. So whenever I do these, talks, I always ask people questions, and it's great that we've got a poll today. This is an example on the screen of questions that I ask before the workshops that I run, and I want to share with you some of the outputs or outcomes of the questions that I ask, and it kind of acts as a constant feed of information and how the market's doing. So most of the people that attend the workshops and things that I run have not secured funding for their startup. They're very, very early stage. Some of them have, and maybe it's a friends and family kind of round, but most of them haven't secured any funding. Most of them want to secure funding or raise investment, so there's a reason that they haven't done it yet, which maybe is a part of this. Maybe we'll go into that. When I ask them how many potential customers they've spoken to, the tipping point seems to be 200. There's either a massive amount of people that have spoken to under 200, or there's a handful of people that have spoken to sometimes 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 customers. But the parity between the two is huge, and I'm really interested in why that is. And then, um, when I ask people how many investors they've spoken to, most people have only started the process. And, and hopefully what I'm going to teach you today will help you to do this faster and better with more probability of getting that investment, um, by following these steps that I'm going to give you. Um, and then whenever I ask people what their biggest challenge is right now, it's always the same thing. It's traction, funding, and building a product. Without a doubt. And that tells us something. It tells us that most founders at the early stages are stuck in this chicken and egg situation of needing traction to get funding and needing funding to get traction. And I believe now that we shouldn't be using traction as a, as a blocker for us going to get funding. Because I think there's so many more ways that you can do this nowadays. You can build products faster and more intelligently than we've ever done before. So hopefully this will help speed up that process for you. So the solution to these problems is— the traction and funding problem, I should say— is, I don't believe, is in the traditional Silicon Valley startup process. I think it's in these small micro-improvements that you can make to how you pitch and what you're pitching. And sometimes it's really interesting when I've worked with clients on their pitch, we've literally used exactly what they have and just changed the order, and it makes a massive difference. And I'll tell you why later on in this presentation. So a quick introduction from me after that little ramble. My name is Danny Matthews. I'm the founder of Short Story Ventures. We are a venture studio. We help just over 150 founders get to market every year, and we do that through building a fundable startup brand. So we focus on the branding element of building a startup and getting to market. So anything to do with building traction, building a product, building a brand, and getting it out there in the world. That is what we specialize in. I know Daniel mentioned I'm also one of the directors of FI London. So we have between about 80 and 100 founders go through the Founder Institute program in London every year. And it's an amazing, amazing process. It's one of the most fun things I do. And it's great to get so much feedback and input and really shape what these startups become. So it's a really fun thing for me. I've got my fingers in a few pies over the years. I've been very lucky to invest in 4 companies. I advise 2 startups, and I've just bought my local village café. So a little bit of a turn away from tech, back into the thick of it. In the community that I live in. So there's all kinds of fun stuff going on in my world. So let's get into it. The importance of branding for startups, I cannot stress enough. It's one of these things that I think a lot of startups believe is a nice-to-have and that you'll get to it when you get funding, and I think there's a huge opportunity missed by doing that. And the reason for that is that Branding is kind of misunderstood. I believe that branding itself needs a rebrand. We need to shake off this historic understanding that branding is something visual and something very surface level, because it's not. Branding, when done right, can filter through every single part of your business. It can become the driving force of for you going to get funding and meeting investors. It can help you communicate your message in a more compelling way. It can help you build the right product and not the wrong one and avoid the age-old mistake that the main reason that startups don't succeed, which is just building something that no one wants. And I believe branding is the answer to that. So Let me give you the 4 characteristics of a fundable startup brand, because I think this is probably the biggest thing of this presentation and the thing that I think you could take away and do something with right now. So the 4 characteristics, the first one is an aligned origin, vision, and mission. Now, this is possibly the— this is like very foundational stuff. You should have this down. And if you don't, you should stop everything you're doing and go back to this. And that might sound a little bit unusual to some people, but I'm telling you, whenever I've— I sometimes use the phrase "slow down to speed up," because while people are trying to go and get investment and speak to VCs and build products, you're actually doing the wrong thing if you don't have an aligned origin, vision, and mission. So what this is, is whenever I see founders pitch, I can almost— it's almost like a smell. I can almost smell whether this is the thing that they should be doing because they will tell me something that links with their background. So an amazing example of this is I speak to founders sometimes and they will start to tell me what their product is and what their idea is, and they'll tell me the technical information and the technical detail. And then I'll ask them, where did the idea come from? And all of a sudden they'll tell me this incredible story of their background and how they came up with the idea and how it links to, you know, a medical issue they had or something that happened in their life, or, you know, their life experience, the why, the reason that they're doing this. Starting this business. And I'm captured and captivated by that, but they should have said that first. You know, that's the thing I got really excited about. So that should be the thing that they said first, and that would have captured me much, much quicker. So your origin story is sometimes the most powerful thing that you can use when you're talking to people about your business. You know, and we call this a pitch, but really all a pitch is is enrolling people into your idea. You're just enrolling people into the idea that you want them to come with you on the journey to build. So an aligned origin, vision, and mission is really important because having an origin story that connects with people emotionally and then having a vision of how you want— what you want the future to look like with your problem solved or your solution in it and then a mission of how you plan to get there is something that I think is often seen as maybe a little bit fluffy or not very important, when actually an aligned origin, vision, and mission is the mere definition of passion. So this is a really important thing to get done very early on. You know, I often get asked, what part of branding should I do, you know, the earliest or the first thing you should do? And it should be this. You should have a really, really good, solid idea of why you're doing this business and the story behind it, the vision of what you want the future to look like with your problem solved, with your solution in it, and the mission, how you're going to solve that problem, what you're going to wake up every day to do. So that's really, really important. And if you haven't got that already, then I would encourage you to slow down, so you can do this and speed up again. It will be a tremendous help for you. So that's number 1. Number 2 is a compelling brand story. Now don't get this mixed up with an origin story. An origin story is very much the origin of your idea or you as a person if it relates to that. A compelling brand story is different. Build your bio. So your bio is 3 stories, and if you get the stories right, then you will be in an amazing position, no matter if you're in front of an investor or a potential customer, in an elevator with someone, or at dinner, or on the phone, or on Zoom, whatever the situation, you'll be in good stead. So these things are your brand story, your investor story, and your origin story. Your brand story being that you're— it's told from your customer's point of view. You are telling the story as a customer. Now, I don't know if you caught this last time, but one of the things that I would encourage everybody to do is to go to your website or landing page or wherever you communicate with customers or try and convert customers, and whatever it says on the page, I can almost guarantee that it's a we sentence. It is about you as a company or a founder. I want you to change that to a you sentence, meaning that you say something that is from the customer's point of view. For example, instead of saying, "We are the best thing since sliced bread," what I want you to say is, "Sliced bread exists because of us." And that tiny little switch that you can make in the language believe it or not, will do a lot in the neuroscience of humans, and it will allow you to communicate with the part of the brain that makes buying decisions with emotion first. So go and try it. I almost guarantee that it will make a huge difference. And from doing it before, we've increased conversions by 3 times just by changing one word in a sentence. It's incredible. So if you can go and do that, that'd be the biggest actionable thing I can give you today. So get early traction, try and get some early traction. Early traction is great because you get leverage from early traction. So none of this like finding a technical co-founder or CTO, like build something yourself, get an MVP, do the customer research, and then build some leverage through that traction to be able to go and pay for a product build or go and pay for a CTO. PTO. Too many founders give too much away too early to a technical co-founder when we have tools now that we can use that make it amazing for you to build really quickly. And build a great last and first impression. So the neuroscience behind this is really interesting. So most of us build decks and and sales messages based on logic, but it only taps into 20% of the brain. So it actually doesn't work that well. What we need to do is try and switch around how we communicate, where we tap into the emotion first at the top, because this is the 50% of the brain that makes buying decisions first. And then we need to tap into a habit. So always be asking, am I trying to change someone's habit in order to buy my product? If you're trying to change it too much, then you might find it difficult. And then finally, the logic, the justification for buying, right? That's what we're looking for here. So I can take questions on that, I guess, in a moment. I was going to run through some success stories of Solo60, raised investment at £1 million valuation before they had a customer, before they even had traction or anything. Actually, if we were working together again, I probably would have pushed back a little bit and told him to go and get some traction. But we did it without that and it still worked. The Lazy Environmentalist was a community of 30,000 when I started speaking with them. They launched a sellout product in a flooded market. There's so many bamboo toothbrushes out there, but they launched a product in a flooded market and it sold out to 100,000 into a community of 100,000 people. So incredible launch. And then VideoWorks actually started generating revenue before they built their MVP. They literally told people, if you sign up today and give us your card details, we will be building this in the next 2 months and then we'll give you a 30-day trial. And they actually started taking revenue before they built their MVP. That was really interesting. So there's a lot of options to do the branding side of things. If you've got $30K to $50 mil, you might want to go to one of the amazing agencies out there across the world. In London, there's some amazing ones— Ragged Edge Design Studio, Coto, and the likes. Marketplaces are a little bit hit and miss, places like Fiverr and that kind of thing, just because a lot of them lie about their work examples. In all honesty. And freelancers are amazing. I've been a freelancer myself. Freelancers are amazing, but they are capacity-based. So if one day, one day you might need some work doing fairly quickly, and it might be a few weeks before they get to it. So it's not always a great option. We work in brand sprints, so we work depending on what it is. We work in brand sprints, we work exactly like startups. MVP, iteration, 1 to 2 week sprints. And we end up building stories and identities and landing pages and stuff like that. So I wanted to talk about artificial intelligence, but maybe we'll save that for another day or for the Q&A. So yeah, let's get to it, I guess. And what I would say about the Q&A is it's really easy sometimes to ask broad questions in a hope that someone else will get benefit from it. And what I'd encourage you to do is the opposite. I want you to ask very specific questions about your very specific idea or business, because you'll find that the answer will actually help more people than it does a broad question. So hopefully that was a quick whistle-stop tour, Daniel, after the technical problems that we had. So apologies everyone, and hopefully you get enough value out of the Q&A that we can Maybe we can break up, yes.
Yeah, thank you, Danny, for kind of starting where you left off. So we do have a couple of questions in the chat, but I do want to maybe begin with a question of my own that I've been thinking about. Well, because you just kind of mentioned agencies and design studios, right? So especially as an early-stage founder who's putting their pitch deck together, Oftentimes we, at least right now, right? We hear a lot about, hey, you just need to be out there in the market. You need to get traction, right? How important when it comes to pitching is actual design? Not just your pitch deck, but your product. Like how much should you really work on it as a really early stage startup?
Oh, this might ruffle some feathers. No matter what anyone tells you, first impression is everything. And I know that's kind of geared towards me because I'm— because I run a company that does this, right? But it also means that I've got a lot of data points, and the difficulty with this is that if you look at the data or ask the question. So for example, if you go to an investor or a VC and you say, "What's the most important thing you want from someone who's pitching?" You're going to get an answer that's like, "I want to see traction. I want to see market size." You're going to get all the logic answers. The problem is that the true answer is not something that we're very conscious of. So my answer, to try and answer your question clearly, Daniel, is what investors are actually looking for on a subconscious level, from that emotional, like, 50% of the brain point of view, what they're actually looking for is a compelling brand story. And I realize that's not design, but I'm getting there. So a compelling brand story and a great first impression. Now, I'll also back this up with the fact that we have mentors and VCs and investors come to our Founder Institute sessions every single week, and I guarantee you that 30 to 60% of them, when they give feedback to founders about their pitch, will comment on how their slides look. So even though it wouldn't be the answer to their, to the question, if you ask them, what's the most important thing, it's clearly very important to them because they comment on it every single pitch. And even as a designer, I'm surprised sometimes to hear VCs that are really well-respected say, "I didn't really like how your slides look." I'm like, this is insane. What kind of feedback is this? But they really care because— it gives you a real sense of what's to come. Like, it sets the tone of what's going to happen. It sets the tone for the communication that you're going to have in the future, or the people you're going to speak to, or what the product's going to be built like. Now, the other thing I'll say on this is that I'm a massive fan of Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. He is a product designer by trade, and his whole career has been about putting design and putting functionality in those things before everything else. And he's made the most ridiculous decisions from a design perspective in Airbnb, and they've always paid off. So I'm a big believer that design comes first, but it has to be informed design. You can't just do design without doing the origin, the vision, and mission, without understanding your customers and all those things. Hopefully that answers your question, Daniel.
Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, so like you said, first impressions, they really, really matter, right? And I think even if you're like in a really tough market that's essentially looking for traction, I think you kind of want to be aware of the fact that you're still kind of competing with a lot of startups, right, who might have the same idea that, you know, traction's first, everything else kind of comes later. But anywho, yeah, great answer. We have a couple of people in the chat who wanted you to maybe go through characteristics 3 and 4, right? So maybe if you could very quickly just run through them.
Yeah, so the characteristics that you need are number 1 is the origin, the alignment in the origin, vision, and mission. So that is, I think you caught that bit. So the origin, vision, and mission is the first. The second is a compelling brand story. Story. So that difference between your origin story, which is like more about you or your idea, and that brand story, which is more told from the customer's point of view. The third one is traction. Now I define traction as data plus a promise. And so I have founders sometimes where they will say that they'll come with a lot of audience. So they'll come and they'll be like, I've got I've got 100,000 people following me across my social media platforms. It doesn't really mean anything unless you can get a promise from those people. Now, a promise might be that they want to jump on your waiting list. They want to give you their email address and their name and they want to jump on the waiting list. Or it could be, I'm going to give you my card details and I want to preorder this thing. So as and when it's out, you can just ship it to me. Like, I'm that excited. So you want both. You can't have one. So you can't just say, I've got a partnership with a company who's got an audience and they're going to advertise it for me or whatever. That doesn't work. Investors won't take that as traction. You need the data plus a promise. You need it. So you need that list, you need that preorder list, you need that preauthorization on cards, that kind of thing. So that's what you're looking for in traction. And I'm sure there'll be questions about numbers and things. So I'd encourage you to get very specific about this is my company, this is what we're trying to do. How many people is probably going to be a question that will come because it's very nuanced. It's like, yes, you can have 72 people that have given you their card details for a preorder, but you can also have 4,000 people on a waiting list. So it's a bit of a way up and it depends on industry and things, I think. So it takes some testing. And the fourth one was a great first impression. The fourth is based on the other three being done, but also a great first impression in terms of the visual communication of what you're trying to do. So can you tell a story in a few words that you can just put up and people understand it? This is where the "just do it" comes from and that kind of thing. Can you tell a story really clearly and a really compelling story in just a few words? Or just a picture or just a graphic or whatever it might be. Our brains are always trying to simplify and contextualize things, so anything that makes that quicker and easier for us to understand, the better.
Awesome, thank you for that answer. So we have a question here from Jenny, which I feel like is probably a lot more common than one might think. So the question is, my startup has a focus on industrial solutions. I find it difficult to tell a good story to resonate with people and get their attention immediately. Could you maybe share some success stories or ideas or examples of maybe industrial products? Just broadly speaking, like, how do you kind of pitch or pitch a startup that, you know, that has a story that might not be very instant to think of, right?
Yeah, I probably need to understand what an industrial solution is a little bit more. Maybe you could, while I'm talking away, Jenny, you could give me an idea of what an industrial solution might be. Like, are we talking like industrial machinery or we're talking something else? So just curious. Whenever you're telling a story, it's always based on information input. So when you're telling a brand story about a particular industry or a particular solution, if you like, it's always informed by information you already know. So it could be— yeah, so you're basically searching for a narrative, like what is the thing that people already understand is the way of doing things What is your way of doing things? I don't know if you caught this because of the technical difficulty, but a great, great exercise to do, and you can all do this, and it's one of the simplest and most powerful ways that you can, just for yourself, just get some context around how you would communicate what you're doing, is get an A4 piece of paper, or just a piece of paper, or do it on the screen or whatever. Do one page or or one half of the page that is the story of the world at the moment with the problem that you're trying to solve in it. So I'm trying to think of an example. So maybe that's like access to healthcare, for example. Tell the story of how the world is from a potential customer's point of view. They wake up in the morning. When does the first problem hit? When do they experience it again? How does it make them feel? What's the knock-on effect throughout their life? Tell that story in as much detail as you want. And then on the other side of the page, on a separate page, tell the story again, but tell it from the point of view of the problem after it's been solved. So I'm gonna call this ordinary worlds. So the first is the ordinary world today. Like, what is that story? And then what is the new ordinary world once the problem has been solved? And what does that look like? Well, you know, the same person, they wake up and they don't encounter the problem. What happens instead? What is— how does that make them feel? What effect does it have on their life and the people around them? If you tell them two stories, you will very, very quickly get this incredible clarity on exactly the kind of difference you're going to make in the world. And that is really powerful. That is something you can use through your messaging, through your marketing, through your customer research, through building a product. A really, really smart thing to do. So I would spend time— if you're going to invest in your brand early on, that's what I would spend the time doing. Really understanding the difference between how the world is now and how the world is when you've solved the problem you're looking to solve.
Awesome. So yeah, Jenny added some context here. She was specifically referring to pollutant emission sensors and leak detection for the oil and gas industry. So I feel like there's probably a really great story to tell there, right?
There's probably a few. Actually, I don't think the problem will be telling that story. I think it's actually how you will tell that story and what the specific narrative will be and how you communicate that to people, because it's clearly something that can rub people up the wrong way and people get very passionate about about climate change and the effect that the industry has and things like that. So yeah, it's very nuanced in how you tell that story when it comes to those kind of industries, I guess.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So we have a question here from Jean, which is pretty interesting.
How would you approach the problem of not being able to make recurring customers?
Our product requires a habit-based consumer.
How do you approach a problem of not being able to make recurring customers? That's a good question, um, and, and an interesting business model, I think. Um, you know, there is a lot of talk about recurring revenue type businesses and I guess if you're— if it's not a product that you could have recurring revenue from, that is a challenge. You're almost looking at using referrals as a strategy, if you like. But I don't think that it caps you in any way, which I think is probably contrary to common belief. There's plenty of products that I buy that, that I buy over and over again, but they're not subscriptions, but I do buy them over and over again. So yeah, it would be interesting to learn a little bit more about what the product is, I guess. I know you said it's nutraceuticals, but maybe more specific. Yeah, if I have any other thoughts on that, that's likely to play on my mind actually, because it's an interesting question. So if I have any other thoughts, I'll maybe jump back in, or feel free to connect on LinkedIn and we can talk about it because, yeah, I could do with some more context and some clarity.
Awesome. Yeah, so we have a question here from Dan, and Dan asks from the From the perspective of an investor, right, what side of the customer bell curve is most compelling to funding? Specifically, how niche is too niche, and are there tips on how to shape branding around an underserved area that does not have some modest level of customer interest?
I don't think there's a any specific part of the bell curve that's most compelling. I think there's people that will invest in, in always. But to answer the other question, like, how niche is too niche? I don't think you can get too niche, if I'm honest, because I think as long as you're willing to adapt and pivot quickly if you feel that you need to, it shouldn't be a problem. So the great thing about niching is that you get to really target customer. You get to really target your message. All the things that we're told about niching and why it's good, they're real things. They're true. They really work. So if you can do that in a much more concentrated way. I've never seen it not work. I've— the only times I've seen it, like niching too niche, not work is when someone gives up too early because they're not seeing any traction and they don't, they don't stick with it long enough. Now obviously that obviously creates more questions of how long do you stick with it and those kinds of things. but I think you just get a feeling. I think you just know. And also, you know, you have to see if it works for you. I remember when I first started out as a freelance designer years ago, I kind of had nothing to lose, and I just doubled my price every time someone asked, to the point I said— it was a bit of a game with myself, but I said to my wife, I'm basically going to double my price every time someone asks me to do a job until we get to the point where we can't pay the bills, and then I'll stop and I'll revert. And that's what I basically did. And when it got to the point that I couldn't pay my bills anymore, I was like, okay, I'm gonna drop the price on this one because we're clearly not getting anywhere. What a great way to test the market though, right? Then I think about this in the same way, you know, do it and pursue it until you can't pursue it anymore. Whatever reason that is. But no, to answer your question a little bit more clearly, I don't think that there is too niche of a niche. There's only upside to niching in my point of view.
Awesome, thank you. So what we'll do is we'll take one final question and then we'll head on to the networking. Hopefully, Danny, you have some time and you can kind of stick around. I know there's probably a couple of people who really want to talk to you. So yeah, getting into the question here, uh, Anne asked, how do I know if there's a demand even before developing a product? Like, how, how do you test this, right? Your assumption that, hey, there's this really great solution, do people even want this?
Yeah, so what I, I believe one of the big problems with starting a company now is that we miss out this whole process, which is problem, solution, fit. So we tend to jump straight into like product market fit. Someone says, I have an idea, I think this would work, we need to go and build it and put it out into the market. And it's already too late. You haven't done enough work to do that. So I think every company, if you haven't done it already, and every founder should stop what they're doing and go backwards a little bit. And go to— go back to the stage which is problem, solution, fit. And what I mean by that is don't be so romantic about the solution that you've come up with. Most people are like, oh, I want to create this product, I want to create this app, or whatever it might be, and they get very attached emotionally to what it is. Whereas if you can just obsess over the problem you're trying to solve for as much as you can, like as long as possible, speaking to as many people as possible, you would be very surprised. The solution will create itself. It will rear its head and it will tell you exactly what it needs to be. You'd be really surprised. So if you can stay problem-obsessed and completely solution-agnostic, you will solve more problems and be way more successful, quicker to market, quicker to get investment than anything because you've spent the time really getting to know the customers and their problems and their pain points. And that's how you get to market quickly. You do it slowly and in small increments rather than in big wide net kind of thing. So yeah, I think hopefully that's answered your question, but yeah, I think the answer to this is go back to problem-solution fit before you get to product-market fit. That's my answer to that.
And I know I said we'll get into networking now, but we have this really great question and I really want to know what you think about this, Danny. And we got it in the chat. So I didn't see it earlier. So Melissa asked, how many companies should you ideally have using your MVP before deciding to build the product further?
I guess that's one of those nuanced questions of like, yeah, it takes a little bit more information. I think a good thing to think about in that scenario is a good idea would be like, how many customers do we need revenue to keep the business alive? And then charge those customers. And then at least you can keep the business going while you try and figure out like, what do we develop next? Who do we need to hire? Those kinds of things. And what you'll find kind of, if you can get to that point, you've got a business. You haven't got an idea that needs funding. You haven't just got like a shot in the dark. You've got a business. You've got 15 people paying you to use this thing that is an MVP or scrappy prototype or whatever it is that are willing to pay you. Go to investors and say, oh, I've got 15 people that are willing to pay me and it's actually keeping the business afloat. 'Right now we just need to start a build.' You'd be surprised how many people are interested in that from an investment point of view. I think building a business is massively underrated. I do. I think if it was possible, and it's not possible in all cases, but if it was possible, I would tell everyone to bootstrap. Don't build it yourself. And I'm not just saying this to like ruffle feathers or whatever. Let me give you my own personal example. I, 7 years ago, 6, 7 years ago, created a mind map of the mortgage decision process at lenders. I took it to a company and I think this could be the first digital mortgage application software for brokers in the UK. And he said, yeah, I think so too. And we went and won a £3.5 billion contract with it. We hadn't even built anything. It was a piece of paper. It was a PDF with a mind map on it. So I think everyone should bootstrap. Or like just build something themselves and just take it to people because there's so, there's so much value in intent. I can't stress that enough. There's so much value in your intent that if you just put your money where your mouth is, other people would back you in a heartbeat. So, and I've experienced it, so I want to share that with you because it doesn't happen every day, and I do think I was in a unique situation, but It's a good example, so I think everyone should take a little bit from that experience and see what they can do with it.
Awesome, thank you for that answer. Yeah, it's always really great to kind of hear stories from people within the FI network because we have people all across the globe and sometimes there's kind of always something to take away regardless of wherever they might be, right? Dani, thank you so much for joining us. Folks, thank you for being here. Again, apologies for some of the technical difficulties that we had. We will be sending a recording of the session over to you in the next 48 hours. If you have any questions, if you want to stick around, talk to one another, talk to Dani or me at the FI team, please do join a table in the networking lounge. Danny, any final words before we close things off here?
No, all good. Thank you very much everyone for your patience. I was completely unaware of the technical issue and presented my entire slide deck without you. So hopefully we'll get this recording and I'll stick around and do some networking and stuff so you can hopefully get a little bit more from the session. Thanks for having me again, Daniel. Of course.
That's it, folks. Thank you again for being here. If you want to learn more about FII, do head on over to fii.co. And yeah, I hope you all have an awesome day. We'll see you in the networking lounge.
