Building Blocks

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. OCV will help you start your Building Blocks during Office Hours.

Two-sentence company description

The goal of the two-sentence company description is to make it very clear what your company does and to establish credibility. Two-sentence descriptions follow a formula:

1. The first sentence explains what you do using common market terms. For example, "Duplicati is a secure backup platform for managed service providers."

2. The second sentence explains why people pick you and includes proof points. For example, "MCPJam is used by developers at Asana, HeyGen, London Stock Exchange to test their apps for production readiness."

Name the open source project you’re building around if it’s well known and an important part of your growth story, and/or you are the creator, or the company is the lead maintainer. For example, "Ray AI makes it easy to deploy agentic workloads in Ray." Name your biggest closed-source incumbent if they are a household name and customers don't love it. For example, “Authentik is the open source alternative to Okta."

Your two-sentence description should be forward-leaning and provide enough information to pique people's interest in learning more. The target audience for the two-sentence description is investors, rather than potential users or customers.

Building the habit of effectively and succinctly describing your company will benefit you for the entirety of your tenure as a founder. Even CEOs of well-known public companies typically begin with a two-sentence description when introducing their company.

Everyone in your company should be able to recite the two-sentence description.

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

Category	Prompt
Product	What does your company do? How do you do it differently?
Value prop	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

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.