The power of a meaningful vision — how it helped us to gain momentum
A powerful vision has a strong impact on the success of your company. Especially for early stages start-ups, it is important to tie your vision development to your problem and solution exploration activities. Once you have found a relevant and meaningful vision, you will be able to literally see the impact on your abilities to attract customers, raise money, lead your team and continuously motivate yourself through the hard times of your founder life.
At my own start-up, Qualifyze (fka ChemSquare), we were struggling to develop a powerful and meaningful vision for quite some time. Though we had several attempts over the course of a year, nothing really stuck and started to resonate well once we were getting external feedback. Each time we tried to develop our vision, we left our imagination without boundaries and started to conceptualize what the world would look like when our vision had unfolded. However, none of our attempts were tied to a concrete business problem and thus simply a pure play of creativity and imagination. We speculated upon problems we thought people were having in order to develop a better world, extrapolating on hypothetical trends. And this is where we went wrong. Nevertheless, we didn’t give up but kept trying and experimenting until that one day when we suddenly had it. This was about 12 months into our project after an intensive time with plenty of customer interactions as well as learnings about the industry we were operating in. As opposed to the previous attempts, this time we started our vision from a concrete business problem and a thorough level of understanding. Based on this, we were not only able to develop a meaningful vision, but also able to design a concrete step-by-step plan on how to unfold it. Each step of our journey is designed to solve a core pain of our customers and is built sequentially upon our previous solution milestones. Not only did the vision just feel right to us, but it also performed much better with customers and other stakeholders. Having found our true vision and purpose, marked an important turning point for us. Suddenly there was a higher meaning to everything we were doing.
In the following, I have divided the inherent impacts of the vision into four categories: customer, investor, team, self.
The impact on the customer
One of my friends once complimented me for my ability to plant a vision into somebody else‘s head and outlined that it was a super powerful sales skill. I didn’t really understand what he meant by that and why he brought it up but it got me thinking. Several live-experiments later, I had figured it out. With a meaningful vision, you can turn any customer meeting into a success. Even if customers are not yet ready to buy your service, your powerful vision helps you to keep the conversation going and enables you to still get valuable feedback. You just need to make sure that you communicate it with the right passion and energy — which is not hard provided that it is your main motivator anyways.
“Today, I cannot see value in what you do, but I understand the bigger picture behind it and I am happy to support you.”
A powerful sentence, which I have heard several times since we started to strongly communicate our vision. Especially for a B2B startup, it is extremely important to maintain a close connection with the industry from the beginning and your vision can be the enabler that gets otherwise extremely busy people engaged in a meaningful conversation in your interest. Nevertheless, „only“ having a vision will not save you. You still need to have a working value proposition relevant to some customers. The vision will only enable you to have meaningful conversations with even more stakeholders.
The impact on the investor
Investors want visions. Quite logically, even if your startup is thrusting through the roof in terms of operating numbers, the vision is where the investors will heavily look at to understand where you could potentially take your company. A renown investment company has recently told me in a meeting:
“We look at your vision and the size of the market to evaluate how big you could potentially become and how likely this is”.
A strong and ambitious vision will significantly enhance your fundraising abilities as it stimulates the imagination of the investor.
One of the most obvious examples is Elon Musk, one of the greatest visionaries and storytellers of our time. Elon has the unmatched ability to get people enthusiastic about and believing in his vision so that he is able to raise capital like not many others can. Naturally, it is not just the vision that gets people excited about the Musk ventures, but it does play a core role.
But also in Germany, there are great examples. Laura Tönnies and her success with Corrux is one. Even though the company is still relatively early and young, they managed to achieve a +3 Million € seed financing round. And whilst many factors are right at Corrux, including the extremely talented team, I believe that their strong vision was a key asset in the fundraising process.
The impact on the team
Christian Reich, founder of TEDx Düsseldorf, recently said at an event, I visited:
„It needs a flare (i.e. person) to light up the fire. If you walk ahead with your vision and will to make an impact, people will follow you.“
Christian said this whilst explaining how he managed to implement his vision of bringing TEDx to Düsseldorf in order to make a lasting impact for the city. Straight from the beginning, he was faced with the challenge to mobilize a large enough team on a voluntary basis to cope with the organization and execution of the event. His vision and will to make an impact made it possible.
Transferring this into the overall start-up world, I am convinced that a strong vision gives you the ability to align, motivate and move a team into one direction. A vision does thereby not replace your daily operation steering tools but it provides a general form of guidance as well as an overarching north star. Moreover, your vision provides purpose to the team and can turn any team member into a proud contributor to the wider picture you are striving for.
The impact on yourself
So many times, I found myself in a position where I was feeling small compared to all the other start-ups around me. People were preparing the world for the mobility of the future, creating sustainable delivery systems to strengthen our ecological footprint or enabling companies to transform and train their workforce in unprecedented ways. And we, we were really just solving a small problem for a small group of people. But once we had found our vision, it had a thorough impact on me. Not only did it boost my overall motivation, but it also gave me a universal strength and power. I started to become more comfortable when presenting, I enjoyed talking about what we do much more and I constantly felt a form of pride. The impact your vision has on yourself is probably the most important as it enables you to have long and lasting success.
Personal lessons learned
- Develop your vision coming from an actual business problem and understanding of your business environment
- Use your vision to engage with customers
- Make your vision an integral part of your fundraising story
- Align your team on your vision and leverage it to create an intrinsic motivation across your team
- Push yourself by repetitively communicating your vision to your environment
Many thanks for reading, commenting, sharing and clapping.
