Visual Storytelling

A Guide for Early-Stage Hardware Startups

Succeeding as an early-stage startup comes down to selling a new (and crazy) idea to investors, early adopters and collaborators. Getting their buy-in is essential to secure funding, gain traction in the marketplace and to attract talent. But even the best idea can be hard to sell early-on when development has just started and you’re months away from tangible prototypes — let alone a shippable product. This presents a natural dilemma for many hardware startups: To get funding you need to build it and to build it you need funding. Visual storytelling can offer a way out: By painting a picture of the future you envision, or the end result of your development efforts, you can give stakeholders a much more tangible idea of what you’re trying to achieve.

Architects find themselves in a similar position. Funding for a new project can often only be secured based on a very concrete proposal, creating a need to carefully visualize the end result, long before it is built.

Computer Generated Images (CGI) has played a critical role in visualizing the future of the built environment for the last three decades. This has not only allowed architects to show the final form of the building in photorealistic images, but also to talk eloquently about it’s use, the structure’s impact on its environment and how it may be constructed and operated.

Cloud computing and easy-to-use software has made high quality CGI a more attainable tool for startups envisioning new physical products and solutions. These computer-generated images can integrate with a startup’s narrative to highlight how your product will work, how it will interact with other systems, how it will be packaged and sold and what it will look like in the real world. They can also become an easy-to-read representation of months of development work that might otherwise be hard to summarize. Lastly, CGI renderings, created early on, can serve as a north star for product development, creating a goal for your design and engineering team.

I’ll use concrete examples from our work with startups at URBAN-X to illustrate practical approaches to using CGI in an early-stage startup context.

Many of the components of the Climate Robotics system ended up coming off the shelf, placing the idea firmly in the here and now. Most of these things don’t lend themselves to producing beautiful visuals and the result might look too hacked together to present to investors. CGI can serve as a useful extension here, because design elements that speak to the broader vision of a product can be easily added.

It’s easy to imagine how photorealistic visuals of a product that doesn’t yet exist can be used in misleading ways. It’s important to remember that these renderings are supposed to be a result of a lot of hard work — not a replacement. Much like architects need to carefully plan an entire building before it can be visualized, product developers should consider every nut and bolt of their product before putting a rendering out in the world to sell it.

Working with startups across industries, there are three general steps we’ve identified to go from your business narrative to specific visuals:

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