Updated Investors are Activated Investors

If you’re new to this newsletter, click here to access the rest of my newsletter articles such as the “Why We Passed on this Startup” series, reflections on investing, and tactics on winning in the market. Now, onto today’s post!

Sending monthly investor updates was one of the best decisions I made as a startup founder.

Now, as a founder, creating and sending investor updates was one of a million items on my punch list.

But I’m going to share how the consistency of monthly investor updates created incredible leverage and proved to be my secret weapon for network connections.

I’ll also share several tactics on how I’d recommend executing on investor updates from my founder turned investor perspective.

When I founded my FinTech startup, investors updates were not on my radar screen.

The first time that I heard about concept of investor updates was through the startup accelerator, gBeta. I had an amazing experience on so many levels that is too vast to cover here. My cohort was led by Abby Kursel and Maggie Brickerman, Partners at Gener8tor. Abby and Maggie emphasized the importance of sending these updates on a monthly basis.

At that time I went through the gBeta accelerator, I didn’t have any investors on my cap table. But I was constantly meeting new people - investors, potential customers, service providers, advisors, etc. For me, these updates were more like “follower updates” - people who I had encountered in my startup journey.

In April 2017, I decided to commit to sending monthly investor updates. I stuck with it, month after month. Here is what I found after doing this for the next two years of my startup journey:

✅ Monthly updates take the long tail of ongoing connections the startup is continually making and turn it into a long tail of ongoing value. ✅

I went through my email archives this past week and dug out some of the amazing nuggets of value. These are just a small sample of some of the ones that I found! I recall having 2-4 responses per email monthly update that I would send.

The responses fell across three major points of value three points of value…

1) Monthly Updates Activate Investors