What should I write in my investor updates?

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Very often founders are new to writing updates, which is why we’ve built pre-configured templates to help you write what people typically care about the most.

Below is an explanation of what you can write about with our standard template. Feel free to start using this, or create your own!

Okay, let’s begin!

Intro

Try to summarize your entire update in the beginning in 3–5 sentences or a couple of short paragraphs. This gives people a high-level overview of what to expect in your update and how your business is progressing.

📢 Shout Outs

• By thanking the people who have helped you they are more likely to help you again. The people who didn’t help you may feel more inclined to lend a hand to also receive a future public acknowledgment of appreciation
• Don’t forget to acknowledge your team members in this section as well!
• Protip: Founders often use “@full name (bold)” to publicly acknowledge their help

🏆 Achievements

• In this section we often see founders write 2–3 things that went well since their last update
• It’s a great section to share your biggest wins and things you’re proud of that you and your team have accomplished

🏋️‍♀️ Challenges

• Talk about 2–3 things that didn’t go well or your company is struggling with
• Again, try to be transparent. It’s better to share the low points earlier rather than later. People appreciate honesty and sharing these challenges can help stronger, more trusting relationships

🎯 Strategy

• Discuss strategic changes in your business
• Has your business model changed?
• What’s your go-to-market strategy?
• Talk about your beachhead market and why it makes sense to attack
• Discuss business development and partnership opportunities

🖥 Product

• This is a section a lot of founders write too much about. You are probably 100x more knowledgeable than your investors and advisors about this
• The goal of this section is to make sure your advisors/investors can sell your product and see how things are progressing
• This is also a great section to talk about your roadmap updates

🎙 Announcements

• Discuss any big announcement, events, travel, etc. you’d like to share here

💰Financials

• Share your financials
• You don’t have to send these financials to everyone, but try to share your basic financials in charts
• Cash-on-hand vs Burn

• Revenue

• LTV:CAQ
• Pro-tip: Use charts and graphs to display progress

📈 KPIs

• Plot your metrics over time and be consistent with every update!
• Try to find your “Northstar Metric”…the one metric that drives your entire business
• Example: Facebook found that new users who added 7 friends in 7 days had a much higher likelihood of converting to longterm Facebook users. Once they found this metric it became the key metric they focused on to grow and scale Facebook to the dominating player it is today
• Explain each metric in every update so people can easily reference and understand them. Remember people receiving your updates often get a lot of them and they’re not always going to remember what they’re looking at
• Did things go well? Talk about why. Didn’t go well? Explain
• Pro tip: Use screenshots from metrics/business intelligence dashboards in your update and colored text to make your numbers pop

🙏 Asks

• Write about how people can help you and be as explicit as possible to make it easy for people to help you. If you need intros, write to whom or to what kind of companies and roles. Be specific!
• Pro tip: Include a blurb or forwardable intro about your company that can be copy and pasted to send intro requests
• Remember: Make it easy to help you! People want to be needed. Don’t hesitate to ask for help, that is why these people are here

Other sections you may want to include

• 🏌️‍♂️ Sales
• 📨 Marketing
• 💼 Hiring
• 👤 User Acquisition

Conclusion

• Add a closing statement and thank those who made it to the end for their support
• You can also remind people that you’ve added them to your updates because they’ve expressed interest in your company. If they would no longer like to receive your updates let them know they can unsubscribe with the link included in the email

You now have all the tools and the context on how to write a great update, so good luck and get writing!