5 Important Things to Update Your Investors On

One of the most important and too often forgotten tools to keep your investors updated is sending out email updates every 60 days or so. By keeping your investors updated you are solidifying their reasons for supporting your venture, and it further secures your funding.  

Your update emails should contain these 5 specific topics to include for investors, so they are privy to your company’s growth, success, investment needs, and ROI potential.

1. Financial position and forecast, WITH revenue projections: revenue performance, growth, unit economics, active customers, churn, customer acquisition costs, revenue by customer, etc. In this section of reporting, you provide investors the metrics by which to judge your performance. Discuss runway, fundraising timelines, perhaps be so brave as to mention increasing valuations so they can calculate the growth of their investment for the current and upcoming quarters and into next year and beyond. A forecast of 2 to 3 years into the future will suffice.
2. Business overview: discuss the perfect fit of your offering to the market, revenue potential, growth rates, unit economics, and active new opportunities and promising new initiatives. This lets investors know that you are serious about growth and you’re making the necessary efforts to achieve your goals.
3. Technology and/or product/service update: Talk about improvements, customer feedback, and new development roadmap. Add some timelines if you dare.
4. Team Expansion: adding to your team is important and if you can do it via sweat equity, you’ll gain favors with investors. Update on the current team, advisor additions, and what else is planned in terms of team expansion.
5. Achievements: discuss how you’ve achieved goals set out in prior newsletters. This provides the tempo for investors to count on you to do and achieve what you said you would.

Who does not want to fund a team that sets goals and achieves them? Especially if concurrently they delineate a clear roadmap that shows substantial multiples to investors.

The newsletter format should be standard, have the same format, same topics, and similar organization. Use the same outline and fill in the blanks every few months with new information. Achievements versus goals, etc. Ask for more money at a higher valuation based on the same set formula, preferably a multiple of next year’s revenue or bottom line. Why not?

Once you’ve generated your company’s first ever investor update email, save the template and send updates every 60 days or so.