Once you have successfully wowed your investors and landed the funding for your business, it’s time to get to work. An important part of every startup’s day-to-day is to keep investors in the loop by writing regular investor updates.
Not only do these updates help the investors know how their money is being utilized, but it also helps them understand the startup’s trajectory and what more they can do to help you out.
Before we teach you how to write an appropriate investor update, let’s first briefly discuss what an investor update really is, why updating investors is important, and how to write an investor update. Read on…
What is an Investor Update?
Investor updates are an important document that is shared with investors to provide them with news over the last month or quarter. Investor updates help keep investors updated about key things going on in your startup and how the investor money is being spent.
Some investors like getting regular updates (weekly or even daily) while others want an update once every quarter. Whatever the frequency maybe, you need to agree to the update schedule and stick to it no matter what.
Why are Investor Updates Important?
Sharing regular updates with investors is an important method of keeping your investors in the loop with the successes, failures, and challenges you face as an organization.
By providing regular updates to investors, you can gather resources and advice to continue making your organization successful.
Updates also help keep a healthy relationship with your investors in case you need more money from them in the future or you want them to introduce you to other notable people in the industry.
Read more: How to Create a Clear Transition Plan for your Business
What You Should Include in Your Investor update?
Now that you know the importance of an investor update document, here are some key things to include in your document:
Message from Founders: Include an intro paragraph that outlines some of the latest with products, wins with customers, milestones hit, key hires, and major challenges.
Need Your Help: What you need from your investor is the most important part of the investor update. Make sure you kick it off in one of your first sections. Remember investors aren’t just about supplying money they can be vital resources to help you grow.
Success: Include milestones reached, major clients, sales goals reached, current MRR, ARR (% increase), new hires, press mentions, etc.
Challenges: Every company has its challenges. It’s important to identify what they are and share them with your investors is important. They may have solutions and resources to help you overcome them. It’s better to address them early on than to face those challenges when it’s too late and not correctable.
KPIs: Include the performance of your most important KPIs (1-3). Depending on your company, product, or service this can include your sales numbers, user engagement, etc.
Now that you know the importance and elements of investor updates document, it’s time to put that information to test by using a documentation tool like Bit.
Key Benefits of Creating Your Investor Updates Document on Bit.ai
Creating regular investor updates can be time-consuming. This is where Bit comes in.
Bit.ai is a new-age documentation and knowledge management tool that helps teams to collaborate, share, track, and manage all company knowledge in one place. Bit documents, unlike your standard Word Docs, are interactive.
This means founders can easily create interactive investor update documents easily. Bit also supports document tracking using which you can create and share these update docs with investors and see whether they viewed your update document or how far they scrolled!
Whether your team is creating investor updates, pitch decks, business plan, executive summary, business proposals, brainstorming documents, meeting minutes, SWOT analysis, competitive research, project management plan, etc, they can easily add Spreadsheets, Slideshares, Google Slides, YouTube videos, PDFs, Maps, Charts, Graphs, and more to your investor updates documents and make them visually stunning.
Collaborate with other team members: Multiple people can simultaneously collaborate on a Bit smart document in real-time. It’s a great way for founders to handle different aspects of the investor updates together under a single roof. Bit’s sleek, minimal, and distraction-free editor makes a great tool for documentation.
Create Interactive Investor Updates Documents: Making your investor updates interactive and easy to consume can make sure your investors actually go through your updates document. You can add content from over 100+ various applications that will live inside of your updated documents.
Add Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Google Forms, Gantt charts, social media posts, YouTube videos- basically anything on the internet with a link, and Bit will automatically convert that into live content living inside your investor update document!
Recommended power links and files you can add to your investor update:
- Weblinks
- Google Sheets, OneDrive Excel, Airtable
- PDFs, PowerPoint in Google Drive/OneDrive
- YouTube, Vimeo
- Draw.io, Lucidcharts
- Sketchfab, Figma, Marvel
Easy to Use: Bit has an amazing UI that’s easy to understand by a new user, making onboarding easier. The user experience is phenomenal too as things flow from documents to workspaces swiftly. Whether you want to use it for personal or professional work, Bit’s amazing organizational capabilities help arrange your information easily.
Distraction-free and quick documentation: The best part is Bit’s support for Markdown which allows users to quickly create and format text without any distractions. Once you are done creating your investor updates, you can easily export them as PDFs, Word files, Markdown, and much more.
Multiple ways to share: Bit documents can be shared in a live state meaning that all changes that you make to the document will update in real-time. If you are sharing your documents with investors, partners, or clients, they will always get your most up-to-date changes. You can even embed Bit documents on any website or blog.
Since Bit documents render and are responsive, any changes made to these documents will reflect live on the site! Moreover, features like document tracking, password protection, file access restrictions, etc. help keep your investor updates and other workplace documents safe.
Bit provides a common workplace for team members to collaborate, document, share their knowledge, brainstorm ideas, store digital assets, and innovate together. The best part is that this knowledge is safely secured in your workspaces and can be shared (or kept private) with anyone in your organization or the public!
Here are some of the main benefits of using Bit:
- Collaborate in real-time
- Interlink investor update documents
- Create fully responsive documents
- Create investor update documents only visible to yourself or your team
- Track engagement on shared investor update documents with investors, partners, etc.
Read more: How To Create a Partnership Marketing Plan
Investor Update Template
To make the process of creating investor update documents easier, we have created an investor update template for you! Check it out below:
How to use Investor Update Template with Bit
The process of creating an investor update on Bit is insanely easy! Just follow these four simple steps to create an investor update quickly:
Step 1: Create a Bit Account
Go the home page of Bit.ai and click on Get Started for Free or Sign Up to get started. Enter your email address to sign up. Once in, you can create your personal profile.
Step 2: Create a Workspace
Workspaces are where the work gets done. Click on the ‘Create Workspace’ button on the right. A popup will show up prompting you to add a name for your new workspace.
You can create a workspace around a team, department, large project, client, partner, etc. Inside each workspace, you can create an unlimited amount of Bit documents and access your content library (storage area for all of your digital assets – web links, files, cloud files, rich embeds, etc.).
Step 3: Add Team Members
Bit allows your team members to collaborate in real-time and get work done. Collaboration starts at the workspace level.
You create private workspaces by default. However, you can invite others to join you inside of a workspace and collaborate together with the knowledge, projects, documents and content inside of the workspace.
Step 4: Create Your Desired Document
Once you are in the workspace, click on the ‘Create New’ button. Select ‘From Template’ in the dropdown. A pop up will display allowing you to select a template from the gallery.
In the search box on the top left corner, you can search for an “investor update template”. Once your desired template pops up, click on it and click on the “Use Template” button on the bottom right corner.
That’s it! Your investor update document is ready for use!
🎥Watch this video to learn more👇
Over to you!
Not sharing updates with your investors can make your startup look unprofessional and can hamper future relationships. Using an investor update template can significantly reduce the time and effort required to create such documents, helping founders be consistent with their update schedule and maintain a healthy relationship with investors.
If you need any help with the investor update template or want to know how Bit can help your team, let us know by tweeting us @bit_docs. Cheers!
Further reads:
- How To Make An Employment Contract
- Founders’ Agreement: What is it & How to Create it?
- How To Create An Impressive Pitch Deck
- How to create a Talent Acquisition Process Documentation
