How to make your product features mean something to investors

One of the most fascinating books I’ve read is called Brain Rules by John Medina.
John Medina is (super long title ahead) developmental molecular biologist with special research interests in the isolation and characterization of genes involved in human brain development.
Now that’s out of the way, let me tell you how this relates to raising money from investors. John Medina suggests that our brain can understand details only in the context of their meaning. Which means, in your presentation to investors, you must start with the meaning of what you do. Then the details will have more power.
A lot of time, and especially with tech founders, they tend to dive into the product’s features early on. Weighing the power of product feature advancement and amazingness as the formula that will get them the desired investment.But that is not the case!

Why investors switch off when you start with the details

To make your product look more powerful and, most importantly for investors, to really understand it, explain first why it matters — the motivation for creating it. And then, every product detail will make sense because it will be connected in the investor’s mind to the meaning and higher purpose you described before.
Here is something that happened to me the other day. A friend of mine came in and wanted to share his thoughts on a restaurant he went to. All I did is ask him what he did last night, and he said:
I went to this restaurant that served an incredible pasta with flour that was imported from Italy and, according to the waiter, the secret to their pasta is that they mix the flour with spring water that was never touched by humans until that point. The salad before the pasta was so good.The gelato was truly superb because it ‘s imported all the way from Italy from a family that has a special icing technique and …
Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! I said. Slow down, this is too much to process. I’m not following you.

Now, let’s see how John Medina’s meaning over detail comes into play. It works like magic every time. The moment you put the meaning first, all the details get a whole new deeper appreciation.
Imagine if my friend started his pitch the following way: Hey, I’ve been living in this city for 18 years and yesterday, I went to the best Italian restaurant I have ever experienced here.
Instead of telling him to stop, I will be asking him to tell me more. The meaning of what he just said created a tease in my mind that wants to listen to details.
All the talk about a family-owned gelato and imported flour from Italy will now make much more sense to me.
Your pitch deck is exactly the same. You must craft the meaning of what you are about to say so the listener will want to dive into the details and will be curious to hear them.

So remember, meaning before details