We’re three weeks into 2025 and, like many of you, eager to build on the momentum of last year. But blindly blazing forward without any time for reflection is one way to avoid growth in the year to come. If you want to avoid repeating the same mistakes, looking back can be a helpful practice — at least it is for us. 

 

With that in mind, here are three lessons from 2024 we’re still thinking through:

 

1. Your Company’s Value is the Value You Add

We live in a crowded market. There’s more than one of nearly everything, including your most clever product or tailored service. Because of this, how you differentiate your company in the months to come will be critical.

 

The strongest brands and biggest companies are known for solving their customers’ problems. If your company is an airline — like Delta, who saw significant growth in 2024 — you solve the problem of crossing the country for a major meeting or bridging the distance between old friends. If your product is a sports drink, you solve the problem of dehydration or fatigue. 

 

Companies like Delta or Gatorade have been around long enough that people know the problems they solve, and yet those companies still reference customers’ pain points in their commercials and ads. Why? Because they know what their value is.

 

Your company may not be as well known, but that only underscores the importance of reminding your audience of the problem you solve. Remember: your company’s value is the value you add to your customers’ and clients’ lives. It’s the problem they have that you solve — and ideally better than anyone else. 

 

At a minimum, you have to know how to talk about the problem your company solves, how you solve it, and what the results of buying into your solution are. That leads right into our second lesson.   

2. Video is More Important than Ever

The best products or services aren’t always the ones to win in the market. Instead, the best stories are. If a company can tell their story better than their competitors, they’re going to stand out in the market. 

 

Historically, founders and entrepreneurs have relied on pitch decks or face-to-face presentations to tell their story, but that approach doesn’t work as well as it did in the 1980s and ‘90s — for several reasons.

 

Collectively, our attention spans have only gotten shorter in the decades between the pitch deck’s prime and now. If the thing we’re looking at doesn’t hook us quickly, we move on without giving it a second thought. 

 

That’s why the average investor spends about 30 seconds looking at a traditional pitch deck. Can you explain your business model or MVP in half a minute? Probably not.

 

Secondly, investor networks are not nearly as local as they once were. These days, you may have prospects in various cities and states, multiple time zones, and even other countries. Trying to get face-to-face with each of them would take a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources. It’s just not practical.

 

Which is why video is more important than ever. In a 90-second to two minute explainer video, you can tell your company story in a vivid, interactive way that your pitch deck never could have accomplished — and keep your viewer’s attention because they’re not reading lines of text. 

 

Whether you’re looking directly into the camera or using animation, like we did on our homepage, this video is your opportunity to speak to the problem you solve, tell your audience how you solve it, and what they can expect from your solution.

 

The bottom line: if you want a fresh way to tell your story and attract a bigger audience, you need an explainer video. We wrote about this in more detail back in September. Check it out here.

3. Success Takes Passion and Purpose (don’t pick just one)

Every year in the US, thousands of new startups launch, and around one in five don’t make it 12 months. There is more than one reason why — from not enough money to poor product-market fit — but more often than not, these companies weren’t working with the right ratios of passion and purpose.

 

Passion alone is a cheap fuel. It burns bright, but not for very long. We’ve all seen a company take off like this. They have a great idea and a ton of enthusiasm. They may spend some money on a flashy marketing campaign, and even get some initial interest from customers or clients. But then the wheels begin to fall off. The mundane parts of running a business get pushed to the back burner. Quality control or customer service becomes an afterthought until the passion tank runs empty and the doors close.

 

But if you’re thinking the answer is to run your business on pure purpose, think again. You probably know a company like this too. It is efficient and most likely effective, at least to a degree. The team responsible for running the company might accomplish a lot, but they never seem to live up to their full potential. The problem? No one on the inside enjoys the work, the end users, or each other. There’s no life in a business like this, and it shows. Eventually these sorts of endeavors fold because the spark just isn’t there.

 

Combining passion and purpose is what makes the work of starting a company sustainable day after day, and year after year — and it’s one of the intangibles investors look for in a new opportunity.

 

At The Main Stage, we’ve built a platform that empowers startups and entrepreneurs to do three things.

 

• Attract investors — with an engaging company narrative, embedded video, and convenient access to deal terms
• Manage relationships — including one-on-one chat, advanced analytics that track interest, and network-wide updates to update all of your shareholders simultaneously
• Raise capital — with private dashboards for each shareholder, Docusign integration for executing agreements, and a secure data vault that keeps your company compliant

We took the very best things about the traditional pitch deck, created an investor-focused CRM, and blended them with a powerful backend that positions your company for success. Click here to sign up now and put The Main Stage to work for you today.