The monthly investor update, rebuilt on live data

Most founders start sending investor updates with good intentions and stop around month five. The reason is rarely laziness. Each update means another round of exports from Stripe, the CRM and the accounting tool, another spreadsheet, and another check that the numbers match the last board deck. When a hard month arrives, the work feels even heavier, and the update quietly slips.

Our view: the update should be cheap to produce, so it survives bad months. Below is the format we recommend, the metrics behind it, and how Kimo drafts it from live sources so you only write the parts that need a human.

Elad Gil’s widely shared format is still the best starting point. Asks always come first, because some investors will not read much past the opening section. Then come one or two key metrics shown month by month for the last 6–12 months with growth rates, followed by team, product and partnerships in a few lines each, and then current cash, burn rate and remaining runway¹Source 1 · Elad Gil, 2015Investor Update Emailsblog.eladgil.com. For earlier companies he suggests a shorter version: asks, two to five highlights, two to five lowlights, and progress toward the milestones for the next three to six months¹Source 1 · Elad Gil, 2015Investor Update Emailsblog.eladgil.com.

We merge the two into a single page that works from seed through Series B:

Pick the metrics your board already tracks and keep them the same every month. Changing the KPI set is a signal in itself, and investors notice. For a B2B SaaS company after the seed stage, a solid default is:

• ARR and month-over-month net new ARR. See ARR for what to exclude.
• Net revenue retention, trailing twelve months. See NRR.
• Pipeline created in the month, in dollars.
• Net burn and runway in months. See runway.
• One product engagement metric that predicts retention for your product, such as weekly active teams.

Two presentation rules from a16z apply directly. First, do not use cumulative charts: they rise for any active business, even a shrinking one, so they hide the trend²Source 2 · Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), 201516 Startup Metricsa16z.com. Second, report net burn, meaning cash out minus cash in, because that is what investors use to judge how long your money lasts²Source 2 · Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), 201516 Startup Metricsa16z.com. Show monthly values and let the reader see the slope.

Not every company has meaningful ARR yet. If you are pre-revenue or running paid pilots, replace the revenue rows with the metrics that best predict revenue for you: activated accounts, weekly active teams, pilot-to-contract conversion, or usage per account. Keep cash, burn and runway regardless of stage. Whatever you choose, write a one-line definition for each KPI in the first update and repeat it in a footnote every month after. It costs nothing and makes the series readable a year later, when a new investor is going through the archive in diligence.

When we look at how teams produce updates before they adopt Kimo, the same failure modes come up again and again:

1. 1Definition drift. ARR in the update is pulled from the billing dashboard, while ARR in the board deck comes from the finance model. They differ by a few percent, and nobody remembers why.
2. 2Manual assembly. Six exports, one spreadsheet, one person. If that person is busy, the update waits.
3. 3Good-news bias. Without a fixed structure, hard months get shorter updates or none at all. Investors read silence as bad news anyway.
4. 4No history. Each update is a fresh document, so trends have to be rebuilt by hand every time.

All four problems are structural, and a structural fix handles them: one set of metric definitions, computed from source systems, rendered into a fixed template.

In Kimo, the investor update is a document type in Board decks, next to the quarterly deck and the data-room export. It reads from the same governed revenue model, so every number has a definition, a source and a freshness timestamp.

1. 1
   Step 1:

   Connect sources

   Connect Stripe, HubSpot and your accounting tool from Connectors. Use Google Sheets for anything still tracked by hand, such as headcount plan or bank balances you do not want to sync.

2. 2
   Step 2:

   Reuse the board metrics

   Point the update at the measures already defined for your board deck. If you have not defined them yet, the SaaS metrics template gives you ARR, NRR, burn and runway on one model.

3. 3
   Step 3:

   Schedule the draft

   Kimo builds the draft after month-end close, by default on the third business day. KPIs, sparklines and the cash section are filled in, and the highlights are proposed from the largest metric changes, each linked to its measure.

4. 4
   Step 4:

   Write the human parts

   Add your asks and lowlights, edit the highlights, and adjust the team and product lines. The draft keeps a placeholder for each of these sections, so a hard month does not get skipped by accident.

5. 5
   Step 5:

   Send and archive

   Export to email or PDF. Each sent update is archived with the metric values as of that date, so next quarter’s board deck can quote them exactly.

Behind the template is a short definition you can version alongside your metrics. Here is a simplified example of what the update reads from:

1234567891011121314151617document: investor_update
cadence: monthly
draft_on: business_day_3
model: revenue
kpis:
  - measure: arr
    compare: previous_month
    trend: 12_months
  - measure: net_new_arr
  - measure: nrr_ttm
  - measure: pipeline_created
  - measure: net_burn
sections:
  asks: { required: true, max_items: 3 }
  highlights: { draft_from: largest_changes, max_items: 5 }
  lowlights: { required: true, max_items: 5 }
  cash: { measures: [cash_end_of_month, net_burn, runway_months] }

Kimo can tell you that net new ARR rose 8% month over month and that two enterprise deals drove most of it. It cannot tell your investors what you need from them, or why a churned customer matters more than the number suggests. Those sections carry the most value in the update, and they should come from you.

Make the asks specific: “an intro to a VP of Finance at a 500-person logistics company” gets answered, “intros to potential customers” does not. Keep lowlights as honest as highlights. First Round’s advice for boards applies equally here: say what you are proud of and what worries you⁴Source 4 · First Round Review, 2015The Secret to Making Board Meetings Suck Lessreview.firstround.com. Investors who see your problems early can help with them. Investors who learn about them late tend to remember that.

Monthly, for as long as you can sustain it. Gil recommends blocking a fixed slot on the calendar, such as the last Friday of the month, and reusing the previous email as the template¹Source 1 · Elad Gil, 2015Investor Update Emailsblog.eladgil.com. After a Series A, the formal rhythm moves to the quarterly board meeting, but a short monthly note keeps the wider investor group informed between meetings. It also makes the next fundraise easier: twelve consistent updates are the best evidence you can give that your metrics are reliable.

Ready to set this up? Start from the monthly investor update template, or read Build your board deck from live data to put the quarterly deck on the same foundation. For the full quarterly process, see The Board Pack Playbook.