Builds the five-beat narrative spine – origin, insight, wedge, traction, vision – that answers why now, why you, and why this before any deck exists.
Builds the five-beat narrative spine - origin, insight, wedge, traction, vision - that answers why now, why you, and why this before any deck exists. Use when a founder says "help me craft my fundraising story", "investors don't get what we do", "what's our narrative for this round", or has metrics and a product but no story that survives a partner meeting. Do NOT use for turning the story into slides - use pitch-deck-builder instead; do NOT use for deciding stage, amount, or valuation - use fundraising-stage-selector instead.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
fundraising-narrative/SKILL.md
---
name: Fundraising Narrative
description: Builds the five-beat narrative spine - origin, insight, wedge, traction, vision - that answers why now, why you, and why this before any deck exists. Use when a founder says "help me craft my fundraising story", "investors don't get what we do", "what's our narrative for this round", or has metrics and a product but no story that survives a partner meeting. Do NOT use for turning the story into slides - use pitch-deck-builder instead; do NOT use for deciding stage, amount, or valuation - use fundraising-stage-selector instead.
---
# Fundraising Narrative
Investors back conviction before they back numbers, and conviction comes from a story with a spine. The costly mistake this skill prevents is building the deck first: founders who start in slides end up with twenty loosely related pages and no answer to the three questions every partner meeting silently asks - why now, why you, why this. Build the narrative memo first; the deck is rendered from it, never the reverse.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: raw material before drafting, drafting before tightening, tightening before any slide exists.
1. Gather the inputs below. Do not draft on assumptions about traction or stage.
2. Interview the founder for raw material. The single best question is "What did you believe a year ago that you no longer believe?" - the answer is usually the Insight. For Origin, ask "Why did this problem choose you?" and push past the resume answer to the earned secret.
3. Draft the arc as six spoken sentences first - one per beat, plus one for the ask. Read it aloud. If it does not survive being spoken, it will not survive a partner meeting.
4. Test the draft against the three questions. Why now must live in Insight, why you in Origin, why this in Wedge + Traction. A beat that answers none of the three gets rewritten.
5. Apply the tightening rules below to every sentence.
6. Calibrate the weighting to stage.
7. Write the one-page narrative memo (template below). Only then map each beat to exactly one slide - resist adding supporting slides until the spine holds. Hand the memo to pitch-deck-builder.
### Step 1: gather inputs
- Stage of the raise (default seed if unstated - but confirm with fundraising-stage-selector if the founder is unsure).
- The single strongest metric, with its denominator and time window. If the founder offers three, force a choice of one.Click to play with sound.