Investor Letter

ℹ️ investors are busy people put this section up top to give them a very brief overview of anything important without having to read an entire update passed 1,000 customers and hit our q3 mrr goal of $100k mrr launched a bunch of awesome new features we’re at 1,002 paid teams, $100,314 mrr (+20 5%), 7 2 months of runway how you can help ℹ️ put this section up top your investors want to help, but don't want to have to dig around for what you need make this the first thing they see ask #1think about how your investors can help you usually an ask here is going to be an introduction request to a potential investor, prospect, partner, etc intros are always a good ask because they're typically quick and you're more likely to get a reply from who you want to meet through a warm connection ask #2you can also ask for general advice or for strategic help on things like sales, marketing, etc thank you’s ℹ️ investors are busy people put this section up top to give them a very brief overview of anything important without having to read an entire update elon musk thanks for advice on leadership and aligning vectors mark zuckerberg thanks for the shoutout on your facebook page reeled us in 20 new customers! ? dharmesh shah thanks for the intro to elon he ended up investing and giving us great advice, as you might have noticed tj mahoney thanks for the feedback on our pitch deck and for the greek chicken salad for lunch successes ℹ️ list out the good things that happened this month make it a mix of qualitative and quantitative wins hopefully a lot of good stuff is happening, but keep it to high level wins and probably no more than 3 4 items some good stuff usually quantitativehopefully you can share actual numbers here, like hitting your revenue goals, usage goals and growth goals amazing new product improvementswe usually quick bullet points of the features we launched in the month if you ain't shipping, you're sinking new feature a quick explanation new feature b quick explanation new feature c quick explanation landed a big new customer/launch awesome new marketing campaigndid you close an exciting new customer? did you launch a new marketing campaign that went really well? share it here startups can be tough and it feels good to reflect back on the wins for the month challenges ℹ️ startups are hard share your challenges here this section is important because investors won't know what to help you with unless you actually share what you're struggling with this section also provides context about what's not going great, so if ? hits the fan, there won't be any surprises for your investors bad news is like fish served fresh it can be palatable, but over time it smells worse and worse the best leaders share bad news quickly not great news #1missed your sales goals? share it not great news #2had to let go of a teammate? share it not great news #3your biggest customer churned and you lost 10% of your revenue? share it next up ℹ️ what are you doing to address your challenges from above? keep these short and probably to 3 4 high level action items usually by the time the reader gets here, they already have a good idea of what you're going to do next month this section should be pretty fast to write because ideally you've already discussed your quarterly okrs and done your monthly planing with your team on what's up next action item #1our team is smart here's what we're up to next month action item #2plan to get back on track action item #3don't worry, we got this here's what we're doing ℹ️ lastly, we like to export each page as a pdf and put them into a shared dropbox folder this way any new investor can read all the previous updates and get all the historical context loaded into their hands view the archive of all the previous updates password = $up3r $3cr37 p4ssw0rd (just don't do this)