Monthly Investor Updates
Now that you've raised your seed round, you have a standing group of stakeholders who want you to succeed—use them. The easiest way to do that is also the easiest habit to let slip: write one update a month and send it to everyone on your cap table, not just your lead.
Why bother
The point of an update isn't to keep your investors informed—it's to make every one of them an advocate who can speak about you accurately: to their partners, to whoever leads your next round, to customers and candidates they know. When things are going well, that's how the news travels. When they aren't, it's how you get help early, before the problem is big enough that you need to ask for it directly.
Keep it consistent
Format doesn't matter much—plain text email is fine, nobody needs a designed deck every month. What matters is that the structure stays the same from one update to the next. Consistency is what makes the trend readable: an investor should be able to skim six months of updates and see the shape of the business, not six different reports that each have to be read from scratch.
We recommend the following structure, in this order, every month:
1. TL;DR
One or two sentences on how the month went. Include the biggest win and the biggest problem—don't make the reader dig for either.
2. Key metrics
Revenue or usage growth, burn, cash on hand, and runway in months. Report the same set every month with month-over-month percentages. Resist the urge to swap metrics in and out as they flatter you that month; the consistency is the point.
3. Asks
Put this right after your metrics, not buried at the bottom. Be specific: name the company you want an introduction to, or paste the job blurb you want forwarded.
"Any help appreciated" gets no responses. A specific ask is one an investor can act on in the ten seconds between reading your email and moving to the next one.
4. Highlights
Three to five bullets: shipped features, closed customers, key hires.
5. Lowlights
One to three bullets on what broke and what you're doing about it.
Founder Tip: this section builds more credibility than the highlights do. Investors already assume the highlights are true; showing you can name a problem and a plan is what earns the benefit of the doubt the next time you need it.
Tools, if you'd rather not do it from your inbox
- Built for investor updates: Visible or Cabal
- Cap table management with updates: Carta, Pulley
- Document management with updates: Papermark, DocSend
None of these are required—a plain email works. They're worth a look if your cap table has grown large enough that keeping a distribution list current is its own chore.