Hey - it’s Jason Yeh 🕺🏻

This is my recap of thoughts I’ve had while helping founders solve their fundraising challenges this past week (5.17.22)

If you have any questions, please reply! I try to get to every comment/question I get :)

On to the Fieldnotes for 5.17.22…

Add these gems to make your investor update shine

If you write regular investor updates, believe me…they could be WAY better.

Why should you care? Over the past 10 years I’ve seen over a thousand investor updates. Within that sea of emails, there have been hundreds of instances (no exaggeration) of a well-written investor update leading to a company changing event – the hiring of a pivotal role, the closing of a deal, the intro to an investor…

How so?

Investor updates are incredibly valuable on a variety of dimensions. They establish trust with your investors, provide material for advisors to share helpful feedback on, arm your supporters with info to evangelize, and open a reliable channel to request much needed help.

Beyond that, they are a simple but productive motivational tool. The need to gather data and report progress (or the lack thereof) represents a regular accountability check that drives teams to produce. This is especially effective given the over-achieving nature of many founders.

And how can they be better?

If you’re brand new to investor updates, you should start by searching on Google or Twitter for some basic advice. There are a ton of investor update templates and guides out there. They’ll outline the common parts of an update, talk about the importance of consistency, and maybe even share a real world example.

Since those common tips have been exhaustively covered, relisting them here would be a waste. Instead, I want to share some of my favorite, lesser-known techniques at making investor updates shine that I’ve encountered over the years.

Here are 6 gems to consider adding to your next investor update:

1. A one-line company description at the top

Repeat what you are at the top of every update in the simplest way possible. Don’t expect your investors to be great at succinctly describing your company. Let’s be honest, it took you a ton of time to get that down yourself. By repeating the one-line description of your company every time an update goes out, you maximize the chances an investor entices a future investor, business partner, or potential hire to spend more time with you.

2. A TL;DR to make sure the most important ask or takeaway is easily consumed

Investors get hundreds of emails a day and have the attention span of mice. It’s in your best interest to create a headline to help the investor understand when and why to spend more time with the email, which a simple TL;DR can do very effectively.

(click to see all six tips...)

Smart Twitter Takes

Turns out, fundraising takes an buttload of time and effort 😩

Startups are insane, amazing, fun, transformational, maddening…all at the same time

Till next week. Stay adamant and be chased.

Jason

P.S. This was heartbreaking to watch…

In case you missed it…

Last week's post broke down how to combine strategies to supercharge an early stage fundraise:

Small asks!

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• Ask me your fundraising questions so I can help you and cover them in a future issue

• Listen with a friend to Funded, my podcast that tells the rollercoaster stories of how founders raised millions (and subscribe🙏)

Feedback Time!