Investor Letter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)