Why should I write investor updates?
“Investor Update” is a common term used across the startup ecosystem to describe a progress report that is typically written by the CEO and/or founding team of a company to:
- Discuss how the company is performing
- What has changed since your last update
- How your KPIs are performing
- What your company needs help with
- and a variety of other things
A common misconception is founders only send “Investor Updates” to their investors.
This couldn’t be further from the truth — to remove any confusion we prefer to call these types of updates “Company Updates.”
So you might be asking yourself, why should I write company updates?
For veteran entrepreneurs that have been through a few capital raises and exits, writing investor updates is second nature. They probably have a hard time remembering when they didn’t write updates. After you raise money from VCs or larger investors this exercise will become mandatory on a consistent cadence. However, there are a variety of reasons (listed below) on why you should be doing this now, instead of waiting until it’s mandatory.
- You want to grow your network
- You need to keep your stakeholders up to speed with what’s going on
- You want to foster relationships with prospective investors
- You want to build trust with your investors and mentors
- You need a way to ask for help
- You want to keep your team and company up to speed with how things are performing
- You want to send weekly CEO notes internally
- You want to stand out from the crowd of other entrepreneurs
- You want to document the progress of your business over time
But, I don’t have anyone to send a company update to?
That’s probably not true…
Unless you live in complete solidarity, you probably have plenty of people to send your company update to, so no excuses!
One of the most important things you will need to excel at while building a business is networking and one of the best ways to grow and engage your network is to update them. When sharing your company update with your network, it’s one of the only times just about anyone will be happy to let you add them to a mailing list, so make it count! People want to hear about your journey and many of them want to help when they can.
Updating the state of your business gives you the opportunity to take the time to have a 50k foot view of how your company is performing and how you can get better.
When you share your high-level view of those wins, challenges and strategic changes you allow other people to understand where you’re at in the process and give them the opportunity to engage and help. Over time you begin to build stronger and lasting relationships with those people. Whether it’s this company or the next, the steps you can start making now will have a lasting impact on your entrepreneurial career.
Our platform is centered around updating and we’ve seen founders send their company updates to a variety of people. Remember that building a company is a VERY difficult journey and you never know who might be able to help you along the way. Which is why we see the most accomplished founders send consistent updates to nearly their entire network, here are some examples of the types of people we’ve seen our founders send company updates to:
- Friends and Family
- Investors
- Prospective Investors
- Customers
- Prospective Customers
- Fellow entrepreneurs
- Partners
- Prospective Partners
- Investors
- Board Members
- Employees
- The list goes on…
Our goal at Paperstreet is to help you excel at this. We want to make it simple to allow you to share the state of your business and it’s data as easily as possible, help you analyze engagement and most importantly grow your network with the right people. If you like to join our waitlist to use the tools we’ve built for managing, composing and distributing updates please fill out this form here and we’ll be in touch!
Our waiting list has been growing quickly and our team is small, so we use this form as a way to narrow in on the best companies to focus our time on.
