As you begin to craft your pitch to investors, you’ll have a natural inclination to simplify it in favor of mainstream adoption, however as you generalize your pitch so that everyone can understand, the process could come at the cost of diluting your original dreams and high hopes.

A few weeks ago, I was attending an event in San Francisco, The Founder’s Showcase, hosted by Adeo Ressi of thefunded.com, and I had the pleasure of hearing a great ad-hoc presentation by Phillip Kaplan of Blippy.com. His product had just launched earlier that day and voice was giddy with the excitement that is often lacking in many entrepreneurs today. I had been following the news about Blippy.com for quite sometime now, even finding myself contributing to most of the articles about it on major tech news outlets. The controversy that had risen out of the Blippy came from the rumor that service was determined to expose everyone’s credit card purchases online to the world’s real-time content stream. I think upon hearing this, half the men in the world eked for a moment about thought of decade old questionable purchases reemerging to the surface such as hotel room porno purchases, or gifts for unidentified mistress or just plain old excessive krispy creme purchases.

While now in hindsight we’ve come to learn that isn’t really isn’t the case, Kaplan’s formula for instigating controversy was a great technique for getting him tons of free press and most importantly, spurring conversations. I spoke to Phil that night about his approach with Blippy and he reassured us that if we weren’t well known enough yet by the mainstream user, we could probably still take advantage of that type of marketing. Still not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but he was right, and as I reflected back on how Baduku began, I realized that we had lost much of the idealistic dreams we had began with. It’s not like we’ve abandoned our dreams altogether but rather, we’ve become embarrassed to admit it.

In the early days, Baduku began quite ambitiously with the idea that the next Presidential Elections 2012 would be highly influenced and affected by the opinions on Baduku. The first time I presented the idea of baduku.com to the other founders Patrick Chang and Ryan Regalado, I started the conversation with “This idea is going to change the world” big words, for a big idea. I explained how baduku.com is the true voice of the public and it gives the common person a medium of expression where they had no real voice before, such as laws, policy, current issues, etc. Polls make the huge assumption that the pollsters are asking the right questions, but only people know the question and that question is changing everyday, so Baduku hands the power over to them. I then closed the explanation by exclaiming that “The next American Idol or the next President of the United States will be decided on baduku.com.”

However, as the website became more concrete, we slowly began to stray away from these monumental goals, in favor of simpler, more readily attainable goals. Their is an odd contradiction that lead us to the road of making our pitch more realistic. Investors, whether they are Angels or Venture Capitalist, are always touting that they are looking for “the next big idea”, “game changers”, “revolutions”, yet when you present your idea with the passionate fervor of a mad scientist, these investors look at you just like that, “crazy” and “impractical”.

What makes it worst is that once our passion has been diluted, it becomes much harder for an entrepreneur to be excited when talking about their idea. We begin to second guess ourselves when we pitched to investors, constantly asking if we were saying the right thing while simultaneously repressing all the original wonderful hopes and dreams I had for the idea.

That conversation with Phillip Kaplan made me realize that I had lost sight of the big picture and that dreams and hopes are never wrong. Not everyone is going to believe in your dream, nor will they be as enthusiastic about it but you as the steward of your idea should always think big and have complete unquestionable faith in it. There will be skeptics, people who think maybe you are too idealistic and that’s not a bad thing, in fact no one should have faith in it more than you. If they did, then you should be worried because they don’t become a partner, they will definitely become a competitor.

I think the point I want people to take away from this is that, as you begin to craft your pitch to investors, you’ll have a natural inclination to simplify it in favor of mainstream adoption. You’ll be convinced that you need to have a generalized pitch that everyone can understand quickly, however, the process or refining your pitch could actually dilute your dreams. The more you look at your idea through the lens of mass adoption the more you will become distanced from the crazy ideas and monumental achievements that you had originally hoped for your idea.