Find your Building Blocks doc on your OCV Dashboard.
Building Blocks are compelling and memorable points that you will use to tell your company’s story. The most compelling points are unique to you and immediately resonate. They are concise, specific, and free of jargon. The best points help explain your company’s traction with real-life examples.
Building Blocks are primarily used when communicating with investors. The top 6-8 points will become the skeleton of your fundraising deck. They will answer the following:
- What do you do, and for whom?
- How in demand is it?
- Why now?
- Why you?
As you add material, curate the list by stack ranking points from most to least compelling. Actively maintaining the list is good hygiene, making it easier and faster to write the best possible version of your company’s story at any given moment.
Getting started
OCV companies start working on their Building Blocks from day one. While the primary audience is investors, you will also use your Building Blocks to recruit a CEO. CEO recruiting typically starts soon after the business is funded, and you may not have much of a traction story yet. In this case, you will want to lean heavily into the “why you” part of the story. If you don’t know where to start, list the top five most powerful facts about your company.
Every company has a Building Blocks doc pre-populated on their OCV Dashboard. Use that document as your whiteboard and write down any interesting points as they come to you. This will begin to build your repository of raw materials that you will curate and refine over time. Your first few points will likely be your two-sentence company description.
OCV partners will work with you to curate your list to identify the most compelling points.
Types of Building Blocks
Building Blocks can be anecdotes, data, insights, quotes, real-life examples, statements, etc. Anything that helps you communicate what you do and why someone should believe in you. They typically fall into one of the following categories.
Market
- Who is making a lot of money in this space right now?
- What is your target customer, how many are there, and what is your ACV?
It’s often convenient when there is a closed-source incumbent that makes a lot of money, and their customers don’t love it. When this option is available, consider including a statement like, “we are the open source version of X.”
For example, “Authentik is the open source alternative to Okta. Okta makes $X per year and has had # of security breaches in the last year. Open source Okta makes sense because… ”
Product
- What does your company do?
- How do you do it differently?
Team
- What’s your relationship to the open source project?
- What special expertise does the team have?
Traction
- How popular is the open source project?
- How much progress have you made?
- How fast are you growing?
Unique Insight
Contrarian, non-consensus or non-obvious, and unique to you
- Why is open core the right approach?
- Why now?
- What is a non-obvious or contrary opinion do you hold about your market?