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Foundersuite
p/foundersuiteModern software for raising capital - over $17B raised
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Nick Haase

Investor Updater - Simple, beautiful workflow tools for investor updates

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Investor Updater is a tool to build monthly or quarterly progress reports to send to investors. Use it to build relationships with prospective investors, and to leverage and activate your existing investors. Research shows that founders who send regular updates have a 200% greater chance of raising your next round. Investor Updater makes you a pro.

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Ariel Assaraf
I did a little search and was amazed to see that there aren't too many tools like this. super useful and right on time (1 week before a board meeting :D )
nathan beckord
Maker
@arielassaraf Thanks! Yeah, we realized that too. If you're a publicly-traded company, there are several investor relations software platforms, but not many exist for startups & privately-helf companies. Investor reporting is a market ripe for improvement via software. Good luck with your board meeting-- DM me if you need a board deck, agenda, minutes template, etc :)
nathan beckord
Maker
@arielassaraf all good! hit me up if you need any of those docs: nathan@foundersuite.com
nathan beckord
Maker
Big thanks to @nickatloot for hunting us! Investor Updater helps founders create beautiful progress reports to send to investors. The idea came from our users. We launched our first product, Investor CRM back in March, and since then, 2k+ startups have used it to improve their fundraising workflow. For these users, either: i) they raised money and thus needed to start reporting progress to their new VC overlords, or: ii) they were told “too early, but keep in touch” and they needed to start sending periodic updates. Diving in, we found that the investor updates / reporting / relations space was a really inefficient and broken corner of the startup landscape. Founders didn’t know what info to send, and investors were dealing with info spread across their inbox, Google drive, Dropbox and half a dozen other sites in half a dozen formats. It was (and is) a mess. With Investor Updater, we are taking a shot across the bow to clean it up, standardize the process, and make life easier for all parties involved. That’s our mission — to improve startup-to-investor relations. Happy to answer any questions, and I would love your feedback, ideas, suggestions. Thanks guys! Nathan ps for those of you who would like a longer overview, I posted more about our story on Medium: https://medium.com/@foundersuite... pps: if you login as a first-time Foundersuite user, the default view is our Investor CRM product. To get to the Investor Updater, click the navigation bar on the left side. :)
Clara Beate Malm
I can really see the value of this, these processes do indeed get quite messy sometimes. Good job guys!
nathan beckord
Maker
@clarabeate Hi Clara, totally agree. We are "process junkies"... even though fundraising and investor relations is not rocket science, it can be confusing and anxiety-ridden (especially for first-time CEOs). But both activities can be broken down into actionable steps with software. This product is baby steps in that direction.
Mikael Kristianslund
This looks awesome! 👏👌
nathan beckord
Maker
@mikaelkrist why thank you very much! :) We put a lot of work into NOT adding bells and whistles, and instead keeping it super-simple and flexible.
McQuillan Shane
excellent, well done indeed
Greg 'X' Willis
Love it, great product!
Tom Frazier
Can you share some of the reports that you've included?
nathan beckord
Maker
@tomfrazier Hi Tom! So, the reports are comprised of customizable "elements" that can be dragged-and-dropped into the template builder. The standardized Text elements include: Company Summary, Financial Summary, Challenges, How You Can Help, Shout Outs and Thank Yous, Other / Optional (product releases, marketing highlights, key hires, etc). Each text element by default comes with examples of what to write. There's also a KPI table builder and the ability to add images and attachments.
Ela
This is a nice addition to Foundersuite CRM, can be helpful in fundraising process and staying in touch.
nathan beckord
Maker
@madidi707 Thanks Ela. Appreciate the kind words. It's the next step toward our vision of the complete "funding stack" ...a set of tools that help founders run their investor outreach, deal process, and post-funding reporting (maybe board management too, we'll see :)
David Rodríguez
Hey man! That's really useful. @sailornathan What is the final output? We'll get a PDF? Url? Btw, you said that by default we can see templates for each piece, but once edited we can save for future revisions, right?
nathan beckord
Maker
@davidrodriguezc The final output is a unique URL that you as the founder can send to your investors. Right now there's not an option to export to PDF (and we have reasons for wanting to keep the report hosted entirely online-- namely, so the report is "dynamic" and can be controlled, edited or updated by the founder, vs. a PDF or slide deck that is out of your control once you attach it and hit send).
nathan beckord
Maker
@davidrodriguezc Oh, and to your other question-- yes, you can create and save templates for future revisions. For example, some of our users have a template for "Current Investors" (folks who have already put in $) and "Prospective Investors" (folks you're still trying to build a relationship with). The former is usually more detailed and has more sensitive info.
Max Pelzner
This is very comparable to https://visible.vc/ 💸
nathan beckord
Maker
@whoismaxpelzner Hi Max, I have not directly used Visible myself, but I think the goals are similar-- to improve and streamline founder and stakeholder communications. It's an area with plenty of room for improvement (and multiple players, of course! :)
Jay Melone
Seems like Nathan and team have put yet another great tool out there for startups to take advantage of.
David Plonsky
This is clever. It looks way better than using email and I like that you can add attachments. Can investors interact or respond with the updates?
nathan beckord
Maker
@davidplonsky David, not at present. But interactivity is on the roadmap...one idea we had (maybe a bad one, not sure) is an interactive message board where investors can comment on the Update report and the CEO can respond. We also had an idea for a "leaderboard" of the most active, engaged investors. Would love to hear the Product Hunt community's opinion on these (or other) ideas.
Kevin Siskar
This is fantastic! Founder to investor communication is often under-rated, but time and time again I see it as one of the most effective ways to get the great help and support most startups need! Anything that makes that easier is a big win! Nice work @sailornathan
Mike Suprovici
This looks like an awesome addition to FounderSuite @sailornathan! Do investors need to create a Foundersuite account to access the update link?
nathan beckord
Maker
@msuprovici Hi Mike, no sir-- investors do not need to create an account to access the update. However, some founders may require the investor to enter their email to be able to view their report (this is at the option of the founder). Having said that, we are working on some tools for investors to better track their portfolios (pay attention, @ak_launchleader :) which will require account creation. But we can save that for a future Product Hunt post :)
john frankel
It's is crazy how difficult it is to see investor updated in one place. Just not possible without FounderSuite. Well done @Nathan in bringing your vision to fruition.
Andy Cook
Congrats on the launch. Big fan of FounderSuite's products. We used the Investor CRM to help us stay organized while raising almost $1M for Tettra.co. What really sold me was the AngelList integration. Made it super easy to add new investors to the pipeline with a quick search. Is there a sample investor update we can check out to see this product in action before signing up? Also, how did you come up with the template structure for the updates? I've seen quite a few different suggested structure so would love to hear the story about how you chose your sections to include the in the product.
nathan beckord
Maker
@andygcook Hey Andy! Congrats on the successful seed round-- super exciting. Here is a sample investor update: https://foundersuite.com/reports... This was made before we released the KPI builder feature (just last week), so it doesn't include that.
nathan beckord
Maker
@andygcook As for how we chose the template structure, it was a balancing act between including all the various report options vs. keeping it simple and clean. We tended toward the latter. In short, we read a ton of blogs, articles, etc on the subject and consulted with several VCs and angels on what they wanted to see in an update, and then put together the "minimal viable report" -- but with the flexibility to customize it around your own needs.
Mike Preuss
Glad to see more players in the space & tackling the problem!
nathan beckord
Maker
@mikepreuss Likewise, Mike! :)
Steve Chew
Nice job, Nathan and team. Staying on top of investor communications can be challenging. This new feature will be super helpful!
nathan beckord
Maker
@schew56 Thanks Steve. Yep, investor communications is usually ranked about last on the list of things that founders want to do :) But it's sort of like going to the gym-- it gets easier after the few few sessions, and you start to see results. One of my many "soapboxes" is that founders need to "put their investors to work" helping out, but that only happens if a) the investor knows what's going on in the company and b) the CEO specifically asks for help. Both can be improved with better communications flows.
Huan Ho
Awesome product and team. The FounderSuite tools and templates were a huge help when I was starting up my company. Highly recommend this to any startup/entrepreneur. Keep it up guys!
nathan beckord
Maker
@huan_ho thanks Huan, glad to see you are thriving :)
Spencer Fry
Cool tool. Back in May I wrote an article on how to write a perfect investor update: http://www.spencerfry.com/how-to...
nathan beckord
Maker
@spencerfry Good article! I like your process -- it's actionable -- and you get into some of the more nuanced "whys" of doing regular investor updates such as time for reflection (so rare in startup land) and team morale. Thanks for sharing! :)
Spencer Fry
@sailornathan Thanks, Nathan! It's all about the whys... :)