A “Fill-In-The-Blank” Investor Update Template for Busy Founders

5 min readSep 28, 2017

There’s a lot of good advice on writing investor updates, but one of our portfolio CEOs recently wrote an update that was so good that I thought it could serve as a template for entrepreneurs everywhere. It’s B2B focused and largely positive in tone, but it’s easy enough to copy, paste, and customize for B2C startups or less upbeat news. Just swap out the [bold] content and you can keep your investors in the loop with almost no effort.

Hey Team,

It’s been an awesome, but intense, [summer/fall/winter/spring]. Many things are tracking well, but there are some challenges we’re working through.

TL;DR

Revenue is up [XX%]
We’re scaling up [Important Product Initiative]
We finally closed [Impressive Customer Brand] for a major partnership
Big time hire — we closed [Impressive LinkedIn Bio] as our new [VP Product/Marketing/Engineering]
[Me/Co-founder/Other Significant Employee] had a major life event — [Wedding/Baby/Marathon]

Key Metrics:

We continue to have a ton of momentum across every important metric. From [Month] to [Month] we grew [Important KPI by XX%+ Every Month]. From [Month] to [Month] we grew [XX%]. We are also on pace for a really huge [Current Month].

[Insert Happy Graph of Rapidly Increasing Sales Figures]

We’ve learned something big this quarter about our [Pricing/Sales/Product Model] and by [Near Future Month] we’ll be on a [$XM] run rate. Needless to say I’m cautiously pumped.

We’ve basically [Xx’d on Key Metric] so far this year and I believe will have [XXx’d] by end of year.

One big thing we are scaling up is our [Important Product Initiative]. We now have [XX+ Companies]/[X,XXX Customers] that have bought Our [Important Product Initiative]. In the last week we’ve added [Cool Company #1, Cool Company #2 and Cool Company #3]. Right now I’ve got more pipeline that I can handle but if you have any companies you think would be a good fit for this let me know.

Fundraising — Series A:

We are in active fundraising mode. This is super aggressive but my goal is to get something done by [Month]. I was in [SF/NYC/Boston] last week for some “sneak peek” conversations with friendlies. These went really well.

Here is my current list of conversations — [Link to Google Doc filled with impressive investors and notes about the conversations you had.]

If there is someone missing from the list that you think I should get in front of, please add them to the bottom and I will connect with you about setting up an intro. If there is someone on the list already that you have a really great relationship with, please let me know :)

The deck is still a work in progress but you can take a look here — [A link to a well polished deck detailing your many impressive feats.]

Learnings since last update:

We now have a meaningful number of people that have hit their contract milestone. Our overall renewal rate is [XX%], which I think is pretty amazing. What we’ve realized though is that if we can get you to do at least two [Core Customer Interactions] the renewal rate goes up to [XX%]!

We are also getting better at getting users to [Core Customer Interaction]faster! Last year it would take us [X months] on average to accomplish this while now we are doing it in [X weeks]. We are starting to focus in on improving this even more.

We also started surveying our members. [XX%] said they were told about [Your Startup Name] from another user and [XX%] said they told at least [XX] people about [Your Startup Name]. Our NPS is [XX]. This is obviously huge but I still think we are just scratching the surface of how powerful our community can be.

Team

The huge growth we’ve seen this year is a direct impact of [X Big Hires] we made at the start of the year for [Key Function #1, Key Function #2 and Key Function #3]. It’s really taken our team to another level and it shows on what we’ve accomplished.

Everyone is pumped and feels the momentum. We are stretched really thin though and while it’s been awesome seeing everyone step up, I do worry about fatigue setting in at some point.

What I feel good about:

[Insert Cool Graph]

The graph on the left shows the huge rise in [Core Sales Metric] and the graph on the right shows the decrease in customer support tickets as [Core Sales Metric] increases.

All the work we’ve done over the last year and half is paying off. We’ve built the foundation that is going to let us grow and provide an amazing experience.

What I am freaked out about

For our [Function #1, Key Function #2 and Key Function #3] roles I invested in director level people instead of junior folks we would then hire over. We’ve also been [Utilizing Faster, But More Expensive Methods of Scaling]. Our burn is up and we’ll be out of money by [Month].

What’s next

Get this round down and put money in the bank account.

We’ve also got to finish Month strong. We are pacing really well but there is [Industry Specific Seasonal Impediment] coming soon so it’s not going to be easy. At the same time we are preparing to take advantage of a massive surge for [Industry Specific Seasonal Benefit].

What I need help with

Please take a look at the list of investors we are lining up — [Reuse that link to Google Doc filled with impressive investors.]

Let me know if there are people we should be talking to or if there are people already on the list you have good relationships with.

Thank you to [Investor #1] and [Investor #2] for helping get the ball rolling on these with intros and deck feedback.

Thank you [Investor #3], [Investor #4], and [Investor #5] for letting me practice the pitch on you.

Thank you for all the support.

Happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thanks!

[CEO Name]

If you found this investor relations hack helpful, follow us on Twitter, clap(👏), and subscribe to our newsletter for more news you can use. Here’s a link to a Google Doc if you want a template without any weird web formatting.