How to Write a Great Investor Update
How to Write a Great Investor Update
This week’s issue is pretty special.
I spent the week chatting with a bunch of friends who are incredible investors, like Ryan Hoover, Greg Isenberg, and Sahil Bloom and more.
I asked them to tell me what they love about the investor updates they get from founders (and what they advise founders not to do, too).
And now I’m sharing their advice with you. Below you’ll read about:
Why investor updates matter
What to do and not do in your investor update
My full investor update template
This is a big one, so let’s dig in 👇
Why Investor Updates Matter
Investor updates are a tool for founders that are good for four key things:
Building Investor Confidence
Your investors trusted you with their capital. You want them to believe that was a good decision.
If they believe you’re a thoughtful steward of their capital, they’ll be more likely to go above and beyond for you in future fundraising rounds either by directly investing again, or by introducing you to other investors they’re friendly with.
Taking a Step Back
I’ve had founders tell me that writing investor updates is distracting. Ironically, this is part of why they’re important.
Founders are often heads down and in the weeds of their business all day, every day. Especially in the early stages, it can be tough to take a step back and evaluate how things are going from a higher, strategic level.
Being Accountable
When things aren’t going according to plan, it can be easier to shrug off failures or challenges rather than addressing them directly.
Investor updates are a forcing function for you to be honest with yourself about how your startup’s strategy is working out.
Getting Help
Let’s be honest: your investors aren’t always thinking about your startup.
Even in the best cases it’s likely that you’re only in consistent, close communication with a few investors on your cap table. Typically, this is your lead and maybe a few others who have large ownership in the company.
It’s your job to leverage your investors’ networks by telling them specifically how they can help.
Investor Update Do’s and Don’ts
Here’s what the investors I spoke with this week advised for founders writing updates:
✅ Do: Be consistent
I recommend monthly updates (and most investors I know prefer them).
Regardless of the cadence, don’t let yourself miss your self-imposed deadlines for getting these out. If investors don’t hear from you when you’ve told them to expect to, it can damage your relationship with them.
The same goes for metrics. Don’t change what you’re reporting on from update to update unless you’re changing directions with the business. It will, otherwise, come off like you don’t have a good handle on what’s most important for the business to grow and reach the next milestone.
You want your investors to understand the business, and trust that you do too:
✅ Do: Start with a Concise Summary
You’re not trying to give your investors homework, you’re trying to fill them in about what’s happening at your startup as concisely as possible. A few sentences at the top of the email giving them a TLDR on the month.
Start your summary with a 1-liner reaffirming your mission statement. Investors typically back a lot of companies, so it’s good to both remind and center them around what you’re trying to achieve before sharing your progress.
✅ Do: Make Clear, Specific Asks
The “Asks” section of your update is the highest leverage part of the update for you as a founder, but most founders don’t use it well.
Your investors aren’t in your team meetings — you need to tell them, exactly, how they can help you and this is where you do it.
BAD → We’re looking for help with marketing
GOOD → Please intro me to B2B marketing agencies who specialize in paid acquisition through TikTok. Here’s a blurb you can send: [blurb]
GREAT → Have a VA go through your investors’ connections and reach out to them individually for specific intros, as Ryan talks about below:
Also, do this near the top of your updates. The further down the update, you’ll risk some investors not seeing it. I’ve even seen founders put this before the summary section at the very top when there’s a critical ask.
✅ DO: Be Transparent with Finances and Metrics
Out of all the topics I mentioned to the investors I spoke with, the most consistent thing they wanted to reinforce was the importance of how finances and metrics are shared.
The most important thing? Transparency:
Also, investors understand that “doubling your users” doesn’t mean as much if it’s going from 2 to 4. Make sure what you’re sharing with them are impactful for your business:
Investors aren’t just interested in what’s happening now — they also want to understand your progress against north star metrics over time. This is even more important for financial metrics like runway, burn, and revenue:
At a minimum, show how your metrics are changing from month to month:
Vedika also shared Paul Graham’s fantastic, related essay
❌ DON’T: Oversell or Sugarcoat Failures
Investors get sold to by founders all day, every day. They can tell when founders are sugarcoating things when times are tough.
If you do this, you’ll be telling investors that either you don’t understand that times are tough yourself, or that you don’t trust they’ll support you unless things go well.
As a founder, you don’t really have a choice here — be honest with yourself and your investors. Trust that they’ll have your back. In fact, it may encourage them to reach out to help more proactively.
✅ Do: Write Two Updates
Ok, not exactly two full updates, but it’s good practice to share a condensed version of your investor update with superconnectors in your network and prospective, future investors. Just make sure to remove finances, metrics, and other sensitive info.
I’ve seen this lead to:
Investors asking to join the cap table
Helpful customer, employee, and partner intros
Much faster future fundraising processes
The reason this works is because investors love to back startups that they feel are de-risked, but getting data they’re confident about is notoriously hard for early stage startups.
If you’ve literally been sending them info for months before asking them to invest they’ll understand how you think and have seen how successful you’ve been at shipping quickly, building an understanding of your market, and hitting your targets.
✅ DO: Use a Clear Subject Line
This one always surprised me — some founders write subject lines that don’t make it clear that the email I’m receiving is going to be an investor update.
Keep it simple: [Startup name] Investor Update - [Month/Quarter] [Year]
✅ DO: Use Simple Language
Don’t lean on technical language or jargon. Maybe your investors will understand, but chances are most won’t. Instead, they’ll wonder if you’re
Struggling to communicate what’s happening at your startup
Being intentionally obtuse or vague
Not putting a lot of care into keeping them in the loop
✅ DO: Optimize the “UX”
Just like you would with your product, think about the user experience you’re delivering to your investors.
And, just like users, investors have individual preferences, so ask them (and listen to your “users”):
A few things are true for most investors though:
❌ Don’t send one super-dense giant paragraph — make your updates easily readable
❌ Don’t write updates that will take more than a few minutes to read. Instead, be concise and ask your investors to follow up if they have questions about specific items you mention.
❌ Don’t surprise your lead investors with bad news
✅ DO: Use a Long Term Lens
Talking about short term wins and losses through the lens of your future milestones and long term vision will help maintain a coherent, easy to understand narrative around the business.
By keeping your investors reminded of where you’re headed, you’ll help them ask the right, most relevant questions rather than getting worried in situations they don’t need to be.
With that said, you’ll also want to communicate changes to your vision as early as possible and clearly explain why they became necessary.
✅ DO: Say Thank You
Include a section in your updates to shoutout investors who’ve helped since your last update.
This isn’t just a nice thing to do, it can also create a nice flywheel for you:
❌ DON’T: Dodge Follow Ups
If investors respond to your update with deeper questions about the business, get back to them quickly. Especially if they have concerns, you don’t want to give off the impression that you’re dodging anything outside of a manicured monthly update.
A good tip is to offer to hop on a call with investors who have questions at the bottom of each update.
✅ DO: Showcase Your Product
Let your investors see what they invested in. Make your updates engaging and, when relevant, visual. Showcase changes to your product through gifs.
One caveat: avoid drifting into self-promotional territory by only doing this when you have major updates to share.
My Investor Update Template
If you use Cabal for your updates, you’ve probably seen their standard template.
It’s good, but I put a template together based specifically on what investors want to see. Get it here.
It’s broken up into the following sections:
TLDR
Asks
Metrics
Updates
Priorities
Shoutouts
If it’s helpful, send a reply to let me know!
📚️ Founder’s Library
🐦 This Twitter thread from Sheel blew up and has some great discussion in the replies about what makes a good investor update.
☕️ Morning Brew’s Alex Lieberman recently recorded a podcast episode for his show, The Crazy Ones, that’s all about investor updates.
🧠 Founder & investor Daniel Gross has a helpful blog post with some fun ways of describing what matters for investor updates.
💡 How I Can Help
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways for us to work together:
Grab time with me for a 1:1 session on fundraising, GTM and growth, hiring, finding PMF, or anything else
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