Visual Storytelling
A Guide for Early-Stage Hardware Startups
Key Takeaways
- Visual storytelling can be a powerful tool to make in-development products tangible and easy-to-explain.
- Creating Computer Generated Imagery is now easier than ever, allowing startups to create realistic visuals that can serve as a north star for product development and help engage key stakeholders.
- Understanding exactly where visuals fit into the company’s narrative and what audience they need to serve is critical to use them effectively.
Why Visual Storytelling Matters
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.
Practical Approaches to Visual Storytelling
Before creating any visuals, both the narrative and intended audience need to be clear. The company’s narrative will inform what you show in visuals and your audience will determine how you might present it. This is part of storytelling in general — a great startup-specific resource is Aswath Damodaran’s Narrative and Numbers.
Climate Robotics, an URBAN-X Cohort 08 startup, tells a story about using robotic helpers to turn field waste into charcoal — a cost effective way to safely sequester potentially large amounts of carbon dioxide. But if robots on a field are hard to imagine, then one that torches the ground to transform dry wheat stubble into a solid form of carbon will certainly raise eyebrows. CGI helped the team to underpin their pragmatic, science-based approach to this, giving credible shape to an idea that might have otherwise sounded far-fetched.
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.
Near Space Labs, a Cohort 03 company, took this quite seriously — building and test-flying their stratospheric camera system (that’s on a mission to upend the satellite imagery market) before visualizing it in 3D, allowing them to show their product in action and not just on the ground.
Beyond showing a product in the best way possible, CGI can help explain how your solution may integrate into third-party products. Resonant Link took a more abstract visual approach to show their groundbreaking wireless charging solution integrated into a range of products, from pacemakers to electric vehicles.
Some ideas are difficult to visualize not because they don’t exist but because they are invisible. Startup Metalmark, a Harvard Nanotech spin-off has developed a nanomaterial that catalytically cleans the air. Their nanoparticles are embedded into a metallic substrate to create long-lasting, efficient catalytic converters. CGI helped them to visualize their solution at the nanoscale — allowing them to easily point to the key differences between their approach and competitors.
A Practical Checklist for Visual Storytelling
Working with startups across industries, there are three general steps we’ve identified to go from your business narrative to specific visuals:
- Writing down your business story is a critical first step. You might have a narrative in your head, but putting it on paper and doing so collaboratively can help make it more concise. Take your audience’s perspective, and try to understand what they look for specifically when considering investing in your business or working with you. Different audiences (investors, early adopters, customers) may want to hear different sides of the story.
- Think about the parts of your story that may raise eyebrows because they’re hard to follow, and consider visualizing these particular parts. Scribble those moments on a whiteboard first and consider what may be necessary to turn them into a rendering. Often, a number of details need to be resolved, and doing so will make it easier to work with someone to create the exact visual you need. During this step it’s also worth think beyond your product and considering what it may look like in a real-world context.
- Creating CGI requires 3D data. If your product doesn’t already exist in CAD, creating a model is a first step. If you need third-party products in your visualization, you can consider getting them from places such as Turbosquid (3D models of almost everything), GrabCAD (3D models of technical systems) or McMaster-Carr (3D models of hardware parts).
The choice of software (if you want to get into CGI yourself) is somewhat personal preference, but here are a few resources to get started: Autodesk Fusion360, Keyshot, Foundry Modo, Onshape, SolidWorks, Chaos Group V-Ray, Blender 3D, Unreal Engine
Finding Talent
Even thought software is becoming ever easier to use, creating high quality CGI is not an quick skill to learn. Here are a few place to look for talent:
Behance offers access to a collection of high-quality portfolios of design professionals. Industrial designers usually have great visualization skills, and can be a good fit when it comes to creating visuals. Platforms like Fiverr can offer quick and seamless access to talent for quick turnaround projects, but reviewing people’s work is important. Design schools such as Pratt (NYC), Parsons (NYC), RISD (Providence) or Art Center (LA) have job boards that are usually a great place to look for 3D design talent (interns, freelancers, and full time).
Lastly, if you’re a startup working on a product that can positively impact city life, consider applying to the URBAN-X program and take advantage of our hands-on support around product development and visualization.
