Send monthly updates to everyone
A typical seed stage founder has a pretty high amount of paranoia that someone is going to steal their idea or otherwise benefit from their learnings. My experience as a three-time founder is that most startups die through apathy of customers and investors, so you are far better off engaging as many people around you as you can.
In particular, you are likely meeting with a fair number of people to tell them about your company. Some of them may be investors. We investors usually write down that we talked to you and some notes about you. Typically you aren’t at a stage where it’s time to invest. That doesn’t mean we don’t like you. In fact, the fact that we took a meeting is a pretty good sign that there is interest. So keep us up to date. In fact, keep everyone up to date.
My recommendation is to send an email once a month to literally everyone you have talked to, add them to your mailing list. Please let them unsubscribe from your mailing list, but you don’t need to ask before adding them :)
In that monthly email, remind everyone who you are and what you do:
‘At CoolWorks, we make work cool. We started in 2016 to focus on livening up offices. Our patented ‘CoolShot’ app keeps track of how much you laugh every day. Use this to set your laughter goals higher.’
Then update them verbally in one short paragraph on what has changed:
‘In February, we signed a major partnership with HP, who really wants to become more cool. This partnership is initially worth $20,000 but could grow to several million dollars over the coming year.’
Then give them your northstar metric in graph form:
Comment on this. What are you doing to move this metric.
‘Yeah, we passed 40% very disappointed users! Sure enough, our word of mouth is working and we can’t do enough paid acquisition to keep up with referrals!’
I use product-market fit here, because if you are seed stage and not using this approach as your scorecard, you need to be: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
Then ask them for help:
‘We need to find current and former clowns to do reward interventions for our biggest customers. Please send your clown friends our way!’
Then give them your key metrics and the normal ones people look for:
LTV/CAC
Payback period
Monthly Metrics:
Bookings: $42K
Revenue: $7K
Financials:
Cash: $8,810K
Net Burn: $314K
Runway: 29
Headcount: 11
Just do that every month. Almost always, you won’t hear anything back. That’s cool. If you care, put your emails into a system that tracks open rates. You will get a pretty good percentage opens because startups are interesting, even to busy people. When people do engage, that’s your opening to ask them if they want to do a quick call to bring them up to date.
