Find your Building Blocks doc on your OCV Dashboard.
Building Blocks are the compelling points that create the foundation of your company's story—your vision, market, customer, and product. They are the memorable facts, anecdotes, data, and insights that make people believe in what you are doing. You’ll use Building Blocks to create a compelling company story that communicates an exciting direction. Your company story will help you recruit first hires, land customers, and fundraise.
The Building Blocks doc is a living doc where you will build a repository of messaging and key points to create content, including your website and fundraising deck. There are four Building Block template tabs to help you organize your content.
- Worksheet: workspace to draft ideas and store key points
- Company story: workspace for drafting your company story
- Fundraising story: workspace for drafting your fundraising story
- Content ideas: a workspace for marketing content ideas
OCV will help you start your Building Blocks during Office Hours. Complete the
pre-interview questions on the worksheet tab before your first Building Blocks Office Hour.Worksheet
Your worksheet is a workspace to collect relevant information about your company and track proof points. It’s a knowledge center where you can draft your value props, document anecdotes, and collect information. Connect your worksheet to an LLM to generate content or get ideas. The more up-to-date you keep the worksheet, the better output you’ll get.
The worksheet is pre-populated with six building block categories: product, value props, market, unique insight, traction, and team. Use the prompts below to start collecting information for each category.
Building Block Categories and Prompts
Product | • What does your company do? • How do you do it differently? |
Value props | • What problem are you solving? • How is the pain addressed today? • How do you solve this problem? |
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? • TAM, SAM, SOM |
Unique Insight | • Why now? • What is a non-obvious or contrary opinion do you hold about your market? |
Traction | • How popular is the open source project? • How much progress have you made? • How fast are you growing? |
Team | • What’s your relationship to the open source project? • What special expertise does the team have? |
Build a habit of consistently adding to your worksheet by documenting new insights, feedback, and major milestones. For example, track the growth rate metrics you’ll share in the monthly investor update, add notable takeaways from customer calls, links to competitor news, etc.
Company Story
The
company story tab is where you will draft and workshop your company story. A company story is a narrative that communicates who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and who you do it for. You’ll use the most compelling points from your worksheet to create your company story. Compelling points are unique to you and immediately resonate. They help audiences connect with your vision, purpose, and momentum.Fundraising story
The
slide titles tab is where you will draft and workshop your fundraising story. Your fundraising story is a version of your company's story tailored for investors. You’ll use your fundraising story to generate your pitch deck. Use the table in the template to workshop your slide titles.Content ideas
The
content ideas tab is a workspace for brainstorming and tracking content ideas. These ideas can be anything from website copy updates to blog posts and videos.