Are you a start-up or founder looking to keep your investors in the loop? Regular investor updates are essential to managing relationships and keeping investors engaged with your business. But writing effective investor updates isn’t always straightforward. 

To help you get started, we’ve created a template for all your investor update emails. In this post, we’ll share: 

• How to write investor updates
• Which metrics to include 
• How to increase investor engagement and support

Let’s get started. 

The Benefits

Let’s start with the why. Why should you write investor updates? 

There are two main reasons:

1. You need to update your current investors and possibly get more money from them
   
2. You want to land new investors

But there are other ways investor updates can benefit you too. 

• Intros - Investor updates can help you network by getting you introductions to people you otherwise wouldn’t have met.
  
• Feedback - When you put your strategies out there for others to review, you also open yourself up to feedback. The right feedback could save you time and money!
  
• Building Relationships - Even if you don’t land an investor on your first connection, you can often remain connected until your progress matches the investor’s thesis. That second connection will be warmer and much easier for both parties. 

Because investor updates are so beneficial to you, you should start sending them out early. Even if you don’t have investors yet. 

By sending out regular reports, even before you have investors, you’re creating reports that give investors historical data to follow up on.

Investor Update Template

Now that we’ve set the stage for how powerful these updates can be, let's look at our template and talk about how to write an investor update. 

To start, copy and paste our free template into an open Gmail draft. Even better, create a template right in the Gmail app, so you don’t have to copy and paste every time you have an update. 

Subject Line

For the subject line, we like to start with the month, then your company name. 

This can be helpful if the investor doesn’t immediately recognize the email sender. And finally, add one interesting metric if you can. 

An interesting metric can improve the chances of your email getting opened and read. 

Email Body

To start the body of your email, begin with a short and simple greeting. Then jump right into the important stuff. 

Who are You, What do You do? 

We recommend starting with a high-level overview of your business. You should have a straightforward sentence explaining who you are and what you do. Include that here. 

Now that your investors have some introductory information about your start-up, you can dive deeper. 

Gather your revenue, spend (expenses), burn/profit, cash on hand, and runway metrics and put them in the email. This process can be quick if you keep track of these metrics in one place.

Charts

We recommend including revenue by month, subscribers, and pipeline info. But, depending on your business model, you may want to add other sections as well.

CEO Report

Next up is a brief summary of your report month. 

Keep this to 2 sentences or less, and if you can, include bullet points. In general, charts and bullet points are much more potent than paragraphs. 

We also recommend including lowlights. Don’t avoid reporting negative information.

Knowing how to communicate negative info is not only critical for founders but also valuable for investors to see. Investors want to know that you aren’t hiding negative metrics from them and are open and communicative. 

Here are two examples of how we’d share lowlights. 

1. “We let 3 team members go: 2 sales, 1 customer support.”
   
2. “We tested a new Google Ads strategy, and it failed. We spent $2,500 on the campaign, and the results were flat. More on this below.”

Team, Product, Marketing, and Asks

Team - Investors want a high-level perspective of the business. Are you hiring? Or are you firing? You can also include full-time staff, contractors, and 1099 staffing numbers. 

Product - When it comes to product, include any updates or findings, but make sure you avoid any small detail changes or highly-technical info. Only focus on things that affect the big picture. 

Marketing - Share any strategies you’re testing, how much you’re spending, and what the results are. 

Asks & Discussions - The ask section is an incredibly powerful tool. Rather than adding links or generic requests, make it easy for investors to help you. Here are some examples of what we’d include here.  

1. “We’re hiring a full-time front-end developer. We’re a remote team working Pacific time. If you know anyone, please email us directly or apply here.”
   
2. “If you’d like to join our waitlist, reply here with, ‘Waitlist me!’ I’ll report on our expansion plans for 2023 in my January update.”

You can ask for any number of things here. The people you’re emailing with may have a ton of experience that can help you as long as you ask for it clearly. 

Final Thoughts

The investor landscape has changed. It’s hard to earn money today. But by sending regular updates and building relationships with investors, you can increase your chances of earning funding down the road. 

Do your future self a favor and start sending updates this month. Copy and paste our free template into your email to get started. 

If you’d like to learn even more tips or see us create an example investor update, visit our YouTube channel for the corresponding video.