Single best piece of fundraising advice you will ever receive

If you’re an early-stage founder, I’m going to give you the single best piece of fundraising advice you will ever receive: Start writing investor updates now.

It doesn’t matter if you’re currently raising a round. It doesn’t matter if you even have investors yet. Create a list of your most important stakeholders, your friends, your family, heck, include anyone you’ve ever emailed with in your life, put them all on an email thread, and start sending monthly updates.

Each one should include:
- Monthly and quarterly milestones
- Progress towards those milestones
- Progress towards one or two core KPIs (no more than two; no vanity metrics and bonus points for using charts)
- Product updates
- Highlights / Lowlights
- Hiring updates
- Any “ask” you might have of your recipients

Let me tell you why this is so important.

Whenever I begin the diligence process for a deal, one of the first things I ask for is a history of the founder’s investor updates. One or two investor updates don’t tell me much. But, if a founder has written 6+ months of updates, I can read the story of the company’s origins and growth as it occurred.

For the investor, the updates answer some important questions like:
- Has this founder proven their ability to repeatedly set and hit milestones?
- How consistently does this founder communicate?
- How much information does this founder share with their investors?
- How can the past trajectory of this company help predict future progress?

The practice of writing investor updates is also beneficial to founders, too:
- It helps reinforce clarity around the company’s mission
- It helps founders set monthly/quarterly milestones
- It keeps founders accountable to those milestones
- It creates a record of progress for future observation

I challenge you to find a founder in your network who actively writes investor updates. I’m willing to bet that their only regret is that they didn’t start sooner.