Preparing an Investor Ready Narrative for Deep Tech
- Chris Burgess
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
How structured product thinking turned scattered progress into a clear narrative ready for grants and early investor conversations.
TLDR
To support funding conversations, I focused on three things:
Clarifying what was known versus unknown This avoided false certainty by making assumptions explicit, showing which decisions still needed validation, and identifying the right buyers or stakeholders to engage on each topic.
Zooming out beyond a single customer This helped place the current focus within a much broader market, separating the near-term wedge from longer-term potential without changing the direction of the product.
Consolidating everything into a single narrative This brought fragmented work together, making it easier to see what had already been achieved, how the pieces related to each other, and where further effort would actually move things forward.
Taken together, this gave the founders a clearer basis for deciding where to commit, where to pause, and where more evidence was still required as they prepared for investor conversations.
Preparing for funding gets your house in order
When I stepped into my recent role, what I saw was immediately familiar from other early-stage teams I’ve worked with. There was substantial progress underway, but execution was moving faster than validation.
What I did immediately was slow things down. Moving quickly had allowed progress to accumulate, but it had also obscured where assumptions were being made and where direction hadn’t yet been validated. If I was going to put together a narrative for investors based on this deep tech product, I needed to understand whether the direction itself could be explained clearly: what was being built, why it mattered, and how the pieces fit together.
I needed to put structure around the work so I could make grounded product decisions, rather than inventing direction as I went. Without that structure, customer discovery and partnership conversations would have remained harder than they needed to be.
The sections that follow outline three lessons I learned while addressing that problem, and the approaches I used to make the work clearer, more testable, and easier to engage with ahead of funding and discovery conversations.
Lesson 1: Clarify what is known versus unknown
As I worked to get the company ready for funding conversations, unfinished thinking surfaced much more clearly. Structuring the narrative around a clear problem, a credible opportunity, and a path from current state to scale made it possible to see what was already proven, and just as importantly, what was not.
Seeing the work this way revealed that much of what initially looked like technical or market complexity was driven by decisions resting on untested assumptions. Mapping the product to its buyers and users surfaced where those assumptions sat, which decisions depended on them, and which questions still needed answering.
This didn’t reduce technical depth or simplify the market context. It made uncertainty explicit and easier to reason about, allowing the team to separate what was proven from what remained a hypothesis and to be clear about how those hypotheses would be tested ahead of any funding conversations.
Lesson 2: Zoom out beyond a single customer
The work had been shaped around a single customer, which made sense given where the product was at. That customer represented real demand and real constraints, and in practice defined the immediate scope of what was being built.
To understand what might come next, I stepped back and looked at the broader market the work could plausibly serve. That revealed a much larger total opportunity, with a meaningful serviceable segment, of which the existing customer was a subset rather than the whole.
This didn’t change the focus of the product. It clarified the difference between the initial wedge and the wider set of use cases the same capabilities could unlock over time, separating near-term delivery from longer term potential without forcing a choice between them.
Lesson 3: Consolidate everything into a single narrative
When thinking is spread across research, slides, and informal assumptions, it becomes difficult to see how much work has already been done, or how the pieces relate to each other.
I put an initial structure around the existing product, market, and delivery thinking so it could be understood as a single journey rather than a set of disconnected ideas. The intent was not to finalise the story, but to make the work visible end to end and expose how decisions in one area affected others.
That shift mattered because it turned scattered progress into something the founders could reason about together. It became easier to explain what existed, to challenge what didn’t quite hold up, and to decide where further effort would actually move things forward.
Why this matters for deep tech investor narratives
The focus here was on how the work to date was understood and communicated, rather than on changing the immediate direction of the product itself. Making the thinking clearer internally was what made it possible to communicate the value proposition outside the building, and to reason more clearly about the competitive landscape.
Once the work was coherent, it became easier to open up customer discovery and partnership conversations without over-explaining or oversimplifying what was being built. The same narrative that supported funding discussions also supported learning and validation beyond the immediate customer, helping to widen the view of the market.
This work was also about direction. Without a clearer understanding of needs, decisions about where to take the product would have been largely speculative. Clarifying the narrative made it possible to articulate a vision that others could respond to, which was a prerequisite for having those conversations in the first place.
Fragmented thinking was brought into a single story, making technical depth easier to reason about and a complex domain clearer to explain without dilution.
For grant assessors, this clarity makes impact and feasibility easier to evaluate. For investors, it makes focus, risk, and upside easier to judge.
If you are leading a startup or scaling a product team and want to turn fragmented work into a clear, fundable story for grants and early investor conversations, let’s talk. I help founders and product leaders organise what they already know into narratives that unlock decisions. Reach out at info@crwburgess.com.
Comments