Visible Blog

Techstars Investor Update Template In the “Minimum Viable Investor Update”, Jens Lapinski, Managing Director of Techstars METRO, lays out 3 items that he finds most useful in his portfolio company updates: Cash flow / P&L top line summary Major changes / developments Problems the CEO is struggling with and wants help on We created a Visible Update template based on the Techstars Investor Update so you can get necessary information to your investors in a quick and professionalize manor. Check Out the Template Here >>>

An Investor Update Email Template for Potential Investors Often regarded as a periodical duty, fundraising can often get buried behind day to day tasks of a CEO. By treating fundraising as a recurring task, you’ll be able to stay on top of your fundraising at all times while keeping potential investors engaged. Jason Lemkin often compares fundraising to a sales funnel and lays out the following 3 duties: Meet as many good, new VCs and investors to the top of the funnel as you can, every week, every month, every quarter; Nurture those VCs over time, so when the time comes to raise another round, some of the prospects are pretty far down the path of wanting to invest; and Make sure your existing investors are your champions. That they are singing your praises. With endless amounts of content for updating current investors and finding potential investors we wanted to see how we can help with, “Nurturing those VCs over time“. By sending over a quick email on a monthly basis to potential investors you’ll be able to build a relationship and pique their interest when it comes time to fundraise. How exactly do you keep potential investors engaged? We have found it best to send out a short update on the state of the business and industry. Share a promising metric or two showing strong growth in the business and any significant wins/improvements. If possible, address any concerns with the industry, team, product, etc. that you have discussed in the past with numbers. Hundreds of emails land in investor’s inboxes so be sure to include a quick snippet of what your company does and any personal notes. By committing to future fundraising efforts now, you will save countless hours when you are ready down the road. You can find our Update template for nurturing potential investors below. As always, If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so.

A Weekly Email Template for Marketing Leaders Marketing is one of the most measurable aspects of a business. With vast data points, it is important to hone in on what truly matters and rally your team behind those key metrics. This week, we have put together an Update template intended for marketers to “report up”. Whether that be a marketing representative to manager or manager to executive, our Marketing template is intended to be standardized across the team to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Key Metrics Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs. Some of our favorite marketing metrics include Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost (check out this video to use formulas to create CAC in Visible), and these 5 metrics for “reporting up”. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Now Content and Campaigns Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Funnel Review A funnel is a quick way for all parties to quickly digest your marketing conversions and inbound marketing efforts. The metrics used in a funnel can be customized to any business as well. Make note of any interesting leads or trends that have noticed over the previous period. Customer Stories Reflect on the past period and share any relevant quotes from customers; good and bad. What is going well? What is not working? Feedback to certain emails? etc.

“Most organizations still believe in the perfect sales and marketing delineation: This is where marketing generates leads for sales, sales development reps then qualify these leads, to create opportunities that salespeople hopefully turn into revenue… The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our CUSTOMERS.” – Jill Rowley – Founder, #SOCIALSELLING As the modern buyer continues to become more informed it is more important than ever that your sales and marketing teams are aligned. It is vital that companies share the right information, at the right time, to the right person. At the end of the day, the marketing teams role is to enable sales to close more deals. A good place to start? Consistent and clear communication between sales and marketing. This week, we put together an Update template for marketers to share with their team, managers, etc. and most importantly the sales team. The template is intended to be shared on a regular basis and lead to conversations to improve different aspects of your pipeline. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so. Key Metrics “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. Find the metrics that are relevant to your team and continue to share and reiterate. Get your team behind the data and constantly communicate with the sales team to find areas for improvement. Keep in mind, our template has popular sales enablement metrics in place but can be changed to your organization needs. The team at Hubspot suggests using Lead-to-Customer as your North Star. Last Week’s Efforts Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Is always useful to include any success stories from reps or potential customers from the past week to help make sure everyone is getting the most out of new content. This Week’s Efforts A quick breakdown of content and changes for the upcoming week. Briefly highlight the goal of the content and where/when it should be used. Most importantly – leave a place for the sales team to offer feedback and share the sentiment from the buyers they have been talking to.

Engage Your Team With This Weekly Sales Report At a high-growth startup, sales operations and processes can often take a back seat to closing deals and growing the business. Regardless of the resources you have available, it is vital to be able to “self-manage” and lay the groundwork for a strong sales process and culture. With that being said, we put together an Update Template that can be used by the first sales hire or by a team of 100 BDRs. Check Out the Template Here >>> Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs (check out these 3 other metrics to track) . With that being said, there are a few things to keep in mind when putting together a reporting template for your sales team: Acknowledge the report, good or bad, to give your reps the motivation to send reports moving forward. Build a cadence with your individual reps and keep updates succinct as well as comparable (make sure to share the same metrics in every report). Just do it! Get feedback and iterate. Make sure to send over feedback to continue to tailor the format and content.

Today we are beyond thrilled to be releasing improvements to our Google Sheets Integration and to announce that we are now a Google Cloud Partner. Our application is now available to the Google Cloud and G Suite ecosystem. What are the improvements? Many of our customers using our Google Sheets integration restructure, manipulate or change their Sheets files over time. Previously it was tedious making sure these changes were reflected into your Google Sheets Dashboards and Updates. Our release today allows for intelligent mapping. As your Sheets change we will understand if rows are moved up, down or removed and automatically reflect those in your Visible account. No action is needed on your part. If you make larger changes to your data set like renaming metrics we may prompt you with a question to make sure we are correctly updating metrics. We will give you the option to fix that in Visible without having to connect & reconnect your connection. E.g. lets say you rename New ARR to New Annual Recurring Revenue. We’ll prompt you with a message similar to the following to let you train the integration further: All you have to do is hit “Yes” and be on your way: What’s next? Google Sheets is our most popular integration, expect to see some more improvements in the coming weeks. We want to make it as easy to get your KPIs and Metrics into Visible. We’re also working on a great resource to make awesome Google Sheet Templates available to our community. If you want a sneak peek check out our Google Sheet Template Library! Up & to the right, -Mike & The Visible Team

While there are countless number of investor update templates the “Fill-In-The-Blank” template below from Micah Rosenbloom, Partner at Founder Collective, was right in line with the best practices we have seen. (You can find the original Founder Collective post using this link). We created a Visible Update template so you can fill-in-the-blanks and have your next investor Update out the door in just a few minutes. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Key Metrics Take a deeper dive into your “Key Metrics” that you have defined and report to your investors. Make sure to keep they key metrics you are reporting consistent from update-to-update. Be sure to mention any changes to the key metrics you are reporting (how you are calculating, renaming, etc.). Fundraising If you are actively fundraising be sure to include any details, asks, and supporting documents here. Learnings Since Last Update Follow up to any of the major discussion points from your last update or meeting. How did marketing campaign X end up performing? What did you learn from any product updates? Etc. What I Feel Good About Include any major wins or significant gains in your key sales/marketing metrics. What I Am Freaked Out About What is keeping you up at night? Be sure to mention any major concerns that your business is facing. This could be anything from frustrations with hiring to a change in the market. What I Need Help With Arguably, this is the most important section of the Update as it allows your investors to step in and help with their experience, network, etc. At the end of the day, your investors are there to help you and are missing a valuable resource if you do not make the asks.

With Q3 wrapping up in a few days, we put together a Pre-Board Meeting Update Template that you can share with your board to help you make the most of your meeting time. By sending over a quick packet before your next meeting it will allow everyone to have time to prepare and come ready to discuss the topics that truly matter to the business. VIEW THE TEMPLATE HERE >>> For the sake of simplicity, we broke our Update Template into 5 major sections: Overview of Previous Quarter A quick overview of the previous quarter. How did you track against your goals you set at your last meeting? Big Wins? Concerns going into Q3? Key Metrics A high level overview of the key metrics you have been sharing with your investors/board. Make sure to include any key events/descriptions for your data over the past period and leave time to discuss any questions at the start of your meeting. Agenda Preview the agenda and schedule for your upcoming meeting. Use input from previous meetings and 1-on-1s to set the agenda and make sure the time will be useful for everyone involved. We suggest checking out Sequoia’s template for a board meeting to get started. Topics of Discussion Offer an overview of the major issues you would like to tackle during your meeting; “working time”. Without throwing too much information at your investors give them the proper data, questions, asks, etc. that will allow them to ponder the issue beforehand and come to the meeting ready. Meeting & Financial Documents Include any necessary financial and meeting documents prior to the meeting. Always a good idea to include financial statements and documents/presentations for your meeting. VIEW THE TEMPLATE HERE >>>

As Q3 comes to an end, it is easy to get behind trying to close last seconds deals, make the right hires, or push product updates but it is vital to stay organized for your Q3 board meeting. A board meeting is not something founders and CEOs should lose sleep over. If executed and prepared for properly board meetings can become an integral part of your company’s success. However, it is easy to lose focus and can easily turn into hours of tracking down data, reading bullet points off a slide, and losing grip of the conversation. To help lighten the load of board meeting prep we’ve put together a short guide to help have your ducks in a row before your meeting: Pre Board Meeting Reporting Being the CEO presenting at a board meeting it can feel like all eyes and pressure are on you. With sending over a structured report before the meeting you can turn the tables and put the pressure on the board to come to the meeting prepared. You never want to spring any surprises during a board meeting, by sending out the packet ahead of time you’ll avoid said surprises and set the expectation that everyone should come prepared. This will also give everyone a chance to read through the packet, request any changes and avoid tedious discussions during the meeting. “Sometimes, if someone asked about something and clearly hadn’t done their homework, I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s in the board pack.’ That’s the most damning thing that can happen to a board member — realizing that all of their peers prepared for the meeting and they didn’t.” – Jeff Bonforte (Former CEO of Xobni) With that being said, it is important that you supply the board with the correct information in a timely manner. Most founders/CEO have found it best to send over their pre-meeting report/packet at least 4 days in advance. Make the report comprehensive and relevant. This can include financials, wins, losses, near term concerns, plus goals for the next quarter. Putting together a pre-meeting report can be a long process (and probably should be) as you reflect on the past quarter and lay out your vision for the next quarter. Putting the time in will be worth it as it will save precious time and allow you to discuss what truly matters. Be on the lookout for a pre-board meeting Visible Update template early next week! Set an Agenda Lets face it, getting a group of people in a room to stay focused is next to impossible. To make the most of your time, lay out an agenda and stick to it! We have found that most board meetings should last anywhere from 2-4 hours. Below you will find an example agenda from the team at Sequoia Capital: Read Sequoia’s guide for preparing a board deck/agenda here. Ideally, if you sent over your metrics and data beforehand you should be able to shorten the time needed to discuss specific metrics. This will allow to focus on what truly matters over the next quarter; fundraising, hiring, product improvements, etc. Not a bad idea to include your agenda when sending over your board report/packet as well as your board deck. Related Resource: Crafting the Perfect SaaS Board Deck: Templates, Guidelines, and Best Practices 1-on-1 Meetings If you are able to carve out time with each of your board members beforehand to discuss any topics one on one – do it! No need for a lengthy discussion but board members will appreciate being kept in the loop and offering input in setting the agenda. If you have any previous asks left hanging now would be a good time to address those. Additionally, this gives you an opportunity to feel out how certain members feel about different topics and votes so you can be prepared to answer any questions and avoid surprises. Provide Solutions Take a look back at the previous quarter and ponder your wins, losses, product updates, etc. and have answers ready to any questions you might face. Instead of an in-depth product review it might be most efficient to focus on any of the improvements you made over the last quarter and why you made them. This way you can avoid countless product requests being thrown around from people who are likely not even using your product. If your sales were down in July, why was that? If your churn was high in August, why was that? While it’s never fun to look back at losses from the quarter it will make your life much easier to have an answer and solution moving forward.

Last week, we broke down the most popular days to send your investor updates. Check out the charts and data below for a quick refresher: The least popular date is the 30th of the month. When the page turns on the past month and updates/reports start flooding VC inboxes how do they view you? The Clockwork CEO The favorite CEO among investors (when it comes to monthly Updates ;). The “Clockwork CEO” has the same time on the same day set aside every month to sit down and crank out their stakeholder updates. The Clockwork CEO has likely created a rhythmic cadence with their investors and give them a “story” to look forward to on a monthly basis. The Weekend Warrior CEO The rare breed of CEO personas (We’re looking at you R.J. Taylor) the Weekend Warrior is one and the same as the Clockwork CEO. Setting aside their Saturday or Sunday morning to sit down and reflect on the past month likely before heading out with the family for the weekend. The Good Times CEO The “Good Times CEO” leaves investors feeling great about the company… until the next month when they receive no updates or news from the founders. After a big win or great product improvement the Good Times CEO Update will land in their investors inbox the next morning. Don’t get us wrong – we like to let the good times roll just as much as The Cars but investor’s offer their most value when you are struggling and have specific asks/issues from the previous period. The Non-Comparable CEO The “Non-Comparable CEO” sends over structured Updates on a regular basis but still leaves a big question mark in the mind of their investors. Switching, changing, and manipulating metrics on a monthly basis leaves everyone involved scratching their head as the next set of data comes rolling in. So how do you avoid misleading numbers? The Buzzer Beater CEO The “Buzzer Beater CEO” leaves their investors on the edge of their seats and always get their Updates across; even if it is the last second. As end of month tasks pile up, the dreaded investor update takes a back seat and is often missing major details and leaves dots for the investor to connect. The Missing in Action CEO The “MIA CEO” is the one that keeps their investors up at night. After the initial enthusiasm that comes with new investors, you find yourself in the “trough of sorrow” and have yet to send an Update after that first polished and optimistic Update. Believe it or not, most investors have made it through the “struggle” and are an integral piece in helping your company bounce back to that initial enthusiasm.

As the old adage goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” When building a startup, it is incredibly important to keep tabs on the metrics, data, and financials that keep your business headed in the right direction. Building your own templates and tracking resources can be time-consuming for a busy founder. Thankfully, there are countless free templates and resources to help you get started in just a few minutes. Check out a few of our favorite free Google Sheet templates to help you better your startup reporting below: An Open Sourced Financial Model for SaaS Startups In the 5th iteration of his SaaS Financial Model, Mike Simmons, the CEO of CredSimple, offers an open sourced Google Sheet template with explanations and resources for the components in the model; ranging from hiring, fundraising, and growth plans. From Mike himself: “I decided to create an open source template so that other founders can benefit from the work that we’ve done. In this project, I have tried to thread the needle between robust and not too complicated or specific. It has been tested by several investors and MBA interns and has proven to work well. But it is up to you to adapt it for your own needs.” Read more here. Runway and Cash Forecasting Tool From the original post by Taylor Davidson of Foresight.is: “This tool is used for forecast your cash and runway. It’s intended to be a simple model with easy inputs for expenses, revenues, and external funding, so that you can get a handle on burn, cash and runway quickly and easily. Input your revenues and costs, and the model will automatically create charts of your burn and runway (over 36 months), a summary of your operating expenses, and an optional sources and uses chart.” Ecommerce Google Sheet Template Dave Ambrose of Steadfast Capital lays out what they have found to be their most important Ecommerce metrics. A few of the major points in the template are the source for customer additions as well as the Contribution Profit (you can read Dave’s original twitter thread here). Read more on the model here. Related Reading: Our Guide to E-Commerce Metrics (with Google Sheet Template) Customer Lifetime Value Template There’s a reason why many experts insist Customer Lifetime Value (we’ll use LTV for short) is the most important metric for your startup. The data points you gather for the LTV formula can help assess the overall health of your company. Not only does LTV provide insight into the long-term trajectory of your startup, but it also gives immediate insight into specific areas that need improvement. Knowing how valuable it is to gain each customer is essential. We created a Google Sheets template that will allow you to plug in your unique numbers to calculate both your LTV and CAC. Read more here. Related Reading: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): A Critical Metrics for Founders Inside Sales KPI Template Every company should also know the progress of their sales team, the goals they need to hit and make sure management understands the return. Don’t forget about the intangibles either. Conner Burt, Chief Operating Officer at Lesson.ly, said the long-term prospects for sales reps can often be about more than just filling a funnel. “Your building a bench that you can use to promote sales reps to quota bearing sales people. That’s an intangible benefit.” With this in mind, we built a simple Inside Sales KPIs template for sales teams in Google Sheets. It is flexible so you can remove any irrelevant info, manipulate it or add anything missing that fits your process. Read more here. Key SaaS Metrics Template For SaaS companies, finding, tracking, and measuring your key metrics is key to success. In order to help you get started with the key metrics, we’ve put together a free Google Sheet template. Our SaaS Metrics Template automatically calculates your key SaaS metrics like MRR, ACV, churn, CAC, payback period, and more. Simply enter in your new customer data and the template will handle the rest. Related Reading: Our Ultimate Guide to SaaS Metrics Let Visible Help with Your Reporting Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days.

We’re thrilled to be launching our Zapier integration out of beta and to bring the power of over 700+ applications to our customer base. Even better is you can utilize Zapier’s multi-step workflows and add on the Visible trigger to your existing apps. Not familiar with Zapier? Zapier connects all of the apps you use to automate your workflows. When something happens in a particular application an action is triggered in another. Check out some examples below to understand how you can automate your stakeholder reporting with Zapier and Visible. Send Sales and Marketing data directly to Visible Metrics. Send KPIs from Pipedrive, Intercom, Mailchimp or any supported CRM and marketing tool directly to Visible metrics. Connect to your database! Want to automatically update Daily Active Users, Transactions Processed or other important KPIs from your own database? Simply setup a query in Zapier and pass along to Visible. Automate all the things. Zaps can be simple, complex and tailored to your every need. You can always fine more in our knowledge base and feel free to reach out anytime to support at visible dot vc. We are standing by and ready to help take your stakeholder reporting to the next level.

When should I send my investor updates? We often get asked questions from customers and prospects ranging from: When should I send my investor update? How long should my investor update be? What should I include in my investor update? While there is no hard and fast rule there are some best practices. (Our first piece of advice is don’t overthink it and just send it! Check out our Techstars presentation for more best practices on Investing in Investor Updates) We have a meaningful dataset at our fingers tip so we brushed up on our SQL query skills to break out some insights with how our customers are using Investor Updates. On average, Visible users are sending investor updates out to ~12 recipients and including ~4.5 charts. Fun fact: The most recipients for a given update is 130 and most charts coming in at 40 (alert: information overload). Here is a breakdown of investor recipients. This is a count for the past quarter and is truncated to show 5 to 20 recipients. Finally, we wanted to see the most popular day of the week investor updates are sent. Unsurprisingly, Monday is the most popular day of the week followed up by Tuesday and Friday. The least popular day of the work week is Thursday with Saturday being the least popular across all days. I also took a look to see the date of the month that are most popular for sending updates. The Top 3 are: 3rd – 5.32% 20th – 5.02% 10th – 4.28% The least popular date is the 30th of the month. Want to learn more? Check out our guide, “How To Write the Perfect Investor Update (Tips and Templates).” Stay tuned for a follow up post with the best days to increase engagement around your investor updates!

This is an updated post from our original “What is Your Investor Net Promoter Score?” from May 2015. It is not a secret that we love Net Promoter Score at Visible. The term “Net Promoter Score” has a corporate ring to it, making it seem like something that startups don’t need to worry about until they “grow up”. In reality, implementing a customer happiness metric like NPS is one of the most important (and easiest) things your startup can do once you begin to acquire customers. An accurate NPS helps you gain an understanding of how loyal your customers will be over the long term and what kind of word of mouth growth you can expect. But it isn’t just the happiness of your customers you should be worried about. Investor Net Promoter Score for Startups As a founder and executive team, part of the job description is keeping all of your key stakeholders engaged in the business and customers are just one of the groups you need to be attentive to. Your investors are another, which is why your Investor Net Promoter Score – the percentage of your investors who would recommend you to potential customers, key hires, distribution partners or follow on investors minus the percentage who wouldn’t – is also key to the long term success of your fledgling business. In theory, your Investor Net Promoter Score should be 100. Why wouldn’t an investor recommend your product or your company culture to someone from the outside? If you close an important sale, bring on a talented engineer or find a new market for your product, your investor’s stake is worth more money, right? In the real world, it isn’t that cut and dry. Investors, like startups, have resource constraints. More importantly, they have a reputation to protect. And while they want all of their companies to find success, their motivations change over time based on how engaged they remain in each of their portfolio companies. The question is, if your Investor NPS is not 100 how do you get there? How to Improve Your Investor NPS 1. Invest in investor updates. Build a regular cadence with your stakeholders. Build a cadence and keep updates succinct as well as comparable. Consistent communication builds trust and keeps you on top of mind for your investors. Make sure to keep your metrics and format comparable from update to update. Ask for tips and preferences to tailor your updates to a format that is best for both you and your investors. Take a walk in your investor’s shoes. When an investor comes across a great designer looking to join a startup, who do you think she will recommend? The company she hasn’t heard from since wiring the money, or the one that comes to her each month with a quick overview on how things are going and how she can help? “The CEO is the investor’s user interface into the business” – Dharmesh Shah 2. Create a culture of candor. While driving an internal culture of candor results in better decisions, execution and output, the same can be said when communicating with your external stakeholders. Don’t be afraid to share bad news. You are not alone, even though it might feel like it. Be frank about the state of the business and make the appropriate asks. At the end of the day, your investors have been in the same situation and are there to help you through “the struggle” or better yet, help you get to the next stage in your business. “Investors can only help if you are transparent all the time, not just in good times.” – First Round Capital 3. Respect their time As touched on before, investors are busy people. Whether they are investing on behalf of a fund or as an individual angel, it is likely that they have other portfolio companies and business ventures that they are dealing with on a daily basis. Your goal should be to give your investors the ability to make the largest impact on your business with the least amount of exertion. When you are seeking advice or introductions, be specific. By doing this, you increase the probability that your investor will take you up on your request, helping to increase their engagement in your business and start a virtuous cycle of “Investor Success”.

Back in April we partnered with OpenView to share our free Total Addressable Market template. With an overwhelming positive response and some inspiration from Point Nine Capital’s “5 Ways to Build a $100 Million Business [Infographic]” we wanted to build a new forecasting template on how SaaS businesses can get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. For this template we partnered with our friends at Foresight & OpenView to provide 4 distinct forecasting models on how a business can grow to $100 million in ARR. You can get the template here! Getting to $100 million in annual recurring revenue is one of those SaaS benchmarks you’ll hear about frequently. It’s a line in the sand that investors have drawn to deem your business “venture-backable” or not. I’m sure many have asked or received the follow question, “That’s great, but how does this get to $100mil in ARR?” Click here to get the free SaaS forecasting template No two paths are the same but there are some commonalities with different go-to-market strategies that can help frame your business. We’ll break down the following markets and their respective distinct metrics: Consumer SMB Mid-Market Enterprise You’ll be able to define your customer acquisition channels, Average Revenue Per Account, contract lengths, growth assumptions, cost assumptions and more! We hope you enjoy! You can find the post in full at Opeview and Foresight. Integrate the Google Sheet template directly with your Visible Account as well! Get the free forecasting SaaS template here!