What Your Investor Needs To Know

Four Sections That Should be in Every Investor Update Email

I know you don’t have much free time. I mean you are a busy entrepreneur who has successfully led a team (no matter how small) to build a product that customers are actually willing to buy. You have spent many hours and sleepless nights crafting your startup’s story and vision for investor meetings and pitch competitions. Now you have obtained those checks from Seed and Series A venture capital firms to expand the business into billion dollar (profitable) business. So yeah, I know you don’t have much free time but your responsibility to your newfound stakeholders is not only to create a return on their investment in the long-term but to also keep them updated on your progress in the near-term.

This responsibility is typically done in an ad hoc manner and first-time founders many times don’t know what exactly to share in an investor update. So I wanted to suggest what four components I look for in an investor update email and a link to a basic investor update email template that entrepreneurs could use. (Note the concepts shared in this post could be leveraged in updates to other stakeholders such as advisors, strategic partners, and board members.)

4 Key Sections of an Investor Update

A detailed and concise investor update should include the following: 1) an Overview, 2) Operations Status, 3) Near-term Priorities, and 4) How Investors can Help. Below, I’ve given detail description of each section:

• Overview: The overview section should feature the important news and recent accomplishments that have occurred since you last reached out to the investor.
• Operations Status: This section provides a snapshot of the startup’s progress in areas that are crucial to the current stage of the company. The author should address essential areas such as additions to the team, financing, and product features launched.
• Near-term Priorities: The next portion of the investor update should list all top priorities for the next period. If your team is focusing on the next month, then all these goals should be reflected in next month’s overview section as accomplishments.
• How Investors Can Help: The Investor update email should end with clear asks that each specific investor can help the startup with. I would suggest that you have no more than 2–3 asks each update email.

Lastly, I wanted to provide you with an investor update email template. You can find the document here. Please feel free to use the template as a starting point to keeping your investors updated and engaged in your startups journey to success.

Earnest Sweat is a Startup Adviser that specializes in mentoring startups within the fin tech, ed tech, and real estate tech sectors. If you have any questions, comments or requests please connect with Earnest through LinkedIn, Twitter, or AngelList.

If you liked what you read please ☞ tap or click “♥︎” to help to promote this piece to others.