July 2025: Workshops, Flights, and 4 Countries Later

This summer, Polar Hedgehog packed up, hit the road (and skies), and took our workshop series across four countries, five cities, and countless startup conversations. From Helsinki and Tallinn to Vilnius and beyond, we partnered with accelerators and innovation hubs like Terkko Health Hub, RedBrick, Baltic Sandbox, and Helsinki Incubators, meeting more than 70 founders face-to-face and virtually to explore what makes a pitch deck story truly resonate.

In total, it was 39 days, 13 meetings, 4 workshops, 6 flights, 2 road trips, and even 1 ferry ride, packed with sharp conversations on storytelling, design, and how to capture investor attention without losing your product’s essence.

It’s been a tour of growth, for us and for the founders we met. We’re excited to keep fueling these conversations, and we’ve pulled together some highlights and numbers from the road to mark the journey.

Workshops That Put the Story First

Throughout our European tour, the heart of our travels was the Investor Deck Storytelling Workshop: Lessons from Real Pitches - a session we ran for accelerators and startup programs in Finland, Lithuania, and Estonia. These workshops brought us together with ambitious founders to tackle one of the biggest hurdles in fundraising: telling a story investors will actually hear.

After running our design workshops for early-stage founders earlier this year, one thing became clear: even a beautifully designed deck can fall flat without a strong, focused narrative.

So for this next round, we built something new - a hands-on storytelling workshop born out of that realization, and tested it with founders across Europe.

Instead of working from theory, we brought real decks, real blind spots, and real patterns we’ve seen again and again, helping teams recognize what’s missing and clarify what matters most.

We focused on five core storytelling tools:

• The Hook
  Capturing attention before you lose it.
  
  
• Avoiding Common Plot Holes
  The facts you forget to say - but investors need to hear.
  
  
• Lost in Translation
  Making sure your unique value doesn’t get buried in jargon.
  
  
• Saying More with Less
  Tightening your message without losing meaning.
  
  
• Focusing the Message
  Finding your story’s center of gravity - and sticking to it.
  

As with all our workshops, our goal wasn’t theory. It was to offer actionable, founder-friendly techniques that help teams communicate what really matters, and win attention in rooms where every minute counts.

To everyone who joined us on this journey: thanks for sharing your stories and giving us the chance to sharpen them with you. We hope you left with new tools (and maybe even a fresh way of seeing your own pitch).