Product Updates

Visible recently released Segment Metrics, a premium portfolio insights tool for VCs. The solution empowers investors to answer key questions about their portfolio performance in seconds instead of hours. How investors can slice and dice portfolio data with Segment Metrics With Segment Metrics investors can find insights related to the sum, average, minimum, and maximum for any custom segment of their portfolio metric data and investment values. Example Segment Insights Examples of insights that can be uncovered with Segment Metrics include: The amount invested in female founders vs non-female founders The breakdown of investments based on sector, geography, and stage A comparison of revenue across seed-stage investments Investors can keep track of these insights by embedding the data visualizations on flexible, shareable dashboards in Visible as shown in the example below. Learn more about setting up Segment metrics in our Knowledge Base. Learn More About Visible Visible has a suite of tools to help with portfolio data analysis including Robust, flexible dashboards that can be used for Internal Portfolio Review meetings Portfolio metric dashboards to help with cross-portfolio insights Learn more about how 400+ Venture Capital investors use Visible to streamline their portfolio monitoring and reporting.

Did you know that 60% of investors don't hear from their portfolio companies on a regular basis? This means that the startups sending regular communications to their investors stand out the most. In fact, startups that provide regular investor updates are 3x more likely to receive follow-on funding. Making the time to write a compelling investor update regularly can be challenging. This is where Visible AI comes in. What is Visible AI Visible AI automatically turns the Request responses that portfolio companies submit to Visible into a narrative Update that startups can use to share with other investors and stakeholders. This equips founders to send regular, professional communications to all their greatest supporters (and sources of follow-on capital), with ease. Learn more about Visible AI and how you can leverage it with your Visible account below. How it Works Visible AI is available to founders who are completing Visible data Requests from their investors. Using the metrics and qualitative answers from a data Request, Visible AI adds context and builds charts to turn the information into a Visible Update that can be shared with other investors and stakeholders. Visible AI Update Example Using the qualitative answers and data included in your Request, we’ll help you turn the response into an Update using the following logic: “{Company Name} Investor Update” — For example, “Acme Co Investor Update” In order to create the content of the update we built a prompt for OpenAI that contains questions and answers from the request. We will create charts and tables for any metrics using the following logic: If a metrics question contains >3 metrics we will create a single table with all these metrics within the update Otherwise, we create bar charts for each metric in the question. Note: if a metric only has a single data point we will create a number chart instead. As always, we recommend reviewing your Update and making sure all of the content is correct and fits your voice. You can check out the full example of the Update here. Visible AI Takeaways Providing investor updates regularly increases your likelihood of success and your ability to fundraise Visible AI transforms your Requests responses into a professional narrative update that you can share with all your stakeholders The Future of Visible AI This is our first introduction of AI into the Visible platform. In the months ahead we plan on exploring AI models to help with fundraising email copy, identifying potential investors for your business, and more. We are always looking for feedback. Feel free to share your AI-related ideas to support at visible dot vc.

Check out Visible’s recorded product webinar to learn about the most recent updates to Visible’s portfolio monitoring and reporting platform. The Visible team demonstrates how to leverage recent product changes to improve your portfolio reporting in Q4 and beyond. Product webinar topics: Common use cases for one-time Requests and how to set them up Saving time by syncing company qualitative responses to Dashboards and One-Pagers Exporting data to Google Sheets for external analysis and reporting Embedding a dashboard in Notion to share with your team Q&A

In the first half of 2023, Visible remained dedicated to helping our community of 350+ investors streamline the way they collect, analyze, and report on their portfolio data. We saw the slowdown in Venture Capital activity during the first part of the year translate into an increased need for accurate and up-to-date portfolio insights that can easily be shared internally and with stakeholders. Both Venture Capital investors and their Limited Partners are relying on data-informed insights more than ever before to guide their next steps. To best support our investors, we focused on making updates to three core functions of our portfolio monitoring and reporting platform during the first half of 2023: Keep reading to learn about some of the specific updates made to our platform during the last six months. Changes to Getting Data into Visible These product updates allow investors to more easily collect budget vs actuals KPI’s and send reminder emails to all their companies at once. Send bulk one-off reminders to all companies (learn more) Ask for up to six future and historical custom KPI’s (learn more) View and edit company metrics in dynamic time periods Changes to Visualizing, Analyzing, and Sharing Portfolio Insights With these changes, users can more easily identify quick insights about their portfolio performance and share it with their team and LPs. Extract quick insights about your portfolio with Portfolio Metric Dashboards (learn more) Applying a custom dashboard template to all companies (learn more) Build a flexible One Pager template for LP reporting (learn more) Uplevel your data visualizations by adding color gradients to your charts (learn more) Share your portfolio company dashboards via a link and choose to password-protect them (learn more) Learn more about analyzing portfolio data with custom dashboards in Visible. Changes to Investment Data Tracking The following updates allow investors to track all their key investment data and fund metrics within Visible. This gives investors real-time control over updating, visualizing, and sharing their fund performance. Convert Convertible Notes to equity with ease (learn more) Track follow-on rounds you don’t participate in (learn more) Choose a custom exchange rate for investment round details (learn more) Capture all your core fund metrics in Visible (learn more) Track and visualize IRR at the fund and company level (learn more) Visualize auto-calculating fund metrics (learn more) Ready to improve your firm’s portfolio monitoring and reporting processes?

We last updated our brand identity in October 2020. Since then, Visible founders have gone from sending 8,000 investor updates per month to over 75,000 — we also launched Visible Pitch Decks and Data Rooms. We’ve learned first hand that building a startup is difficult. Most founders take a major risk to invest their time, money, and careers to build something. At Visible, we want to better celebrate the thousands of founders doing the difficult. We’ve been on the sidelines watching these founders grow while our own team, product, and organization has grown. In order to reflect these efforts, we are excited to roll out our new brand direction that supports this new phase for Visible Putting Visible Founders First In order to put founders first with everything we do at Visible, we wanted to showcase their individual stories and experiences across our marketing efforts. You will notice individual founder headshots, stories, and quotes across the website. Data and Stories to Help the Next Set of Founders Thousands of founders use Visible every month to update their current investors, share their pitch decks, build their data rooms, and manage their fundraising efforts. In order to help the next generation of founders using Visible, we want to highlight the first-hand data and best practices we’ve uncovered. Color, Gradients, and a New Font to Bring Life to Our Brand While difficult, building a startup should be lively. In order to better recognize the highs of building a startup and align with our guiding principles we wanted to refresh our brand. Logo Our logo is staying and is the anchor to our brand. The Visible logomark is made from 3 overlapping, equilateral triangles. Each triangle is slightly transparent, allowing the mark to interact with other design elements. These triangles represent human relationships and the connection between founders and investors. Brighter colors & gradients Our black isn’t going away either, but are using the same color palette from our application to bridge the gap between our product and brand. You will see brighter, more vibrant colors in our product screens to bring those metrics to life. We have also added gradients across our website to enhance some elements like our product screens and call attention to our informational graphs. Bridging the Product & Go to Market Gap We wanted to bring the same sleek and modern feel from our product to our marketing efforts. In order to do so we’ve changed our serif font to a san serif font. Across our website, you will notice product screens that show our product in a more realistic approach.

If your portfolio data is patched together in an excel file with questionable version control or is buried in a slide deck prepared six months ago, your team is likely missing the opportunity to take action on important portfolio insights. Up-to-date, accurate portfolio insights help venture capital investors: Provide better portfolio support Make data-driven investment decisions Validate markups and markdowns during evaluation exercises or an audit Demonstrate traction to LPs while fundraising for future funds …but only if the insights are accessible. Visible’s dashboards help venture capital investors visualize and explain the journey companies are on in a way that actually resonates. Learn more about leveraging dashboards in Visible. About the Guide This guide demonstrates how venture capital investors can turn their portfolio data into actionable, accessible insights. The guide also includes examples of three different flexible dashboard types in Visible. Topics covered include: Portfolio data collection best practices Creating dashboards for internal portfolio reviews (Flexible dashboards) Identifying cross-portfolio insights (Portfolio metric dashboards) Sharing portfolio insights with Limited Partners (One pagers) Visible has helped over 350+ venture capital funds streamline the way they collect, analyze, and report on core metrics from their portfolio companies on a regular basis.

This product webinar was led by Visible’s founder, Mike Preuss, and is aimed at helping investors leverage dashboards to improve their portfolio support, data analysis, internal portfolio review meetings, LP reporting, and more. This session covered: Using dashboard templates to improve your internal portfolio review meetings Building One-Pagers (recently released) in Visible to streamline your LP reporting Unlocking portfolio insights with the release of Portfolio metric dashboards Visualizing and sharing fund metrics in flexible dashboards

Data rooms are the next step to help us on our mission of giving founders a better chance of success. Data rooms are the culmination of a fundraise, diligence, or M&A event. They combine all of the documents, data, and resources that an investor will use to evaluate a company. With data rooms, you can now manage all parts of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors with Connect, our free investor database. Track your conversations in our Fundraising CRM. Share your pitch deck with potential investors. And communicate with current and potential investors with Updates. Learn more about Visible Data Rooms and how you can leverage them for your next raise below: Organize and Structure Key Fundraising Documents Build data rooms specific to your raise. Organize your data room with folders, upload files, and create pages directly in Visible. Segment and Share Specific Folders Securely share your data with investors. Segment their access by individual folders or give them access to the entire data room. Understand How Investors Are Engaging with Your Data Rooms View analytics to understand how individual investors are engaging with different documents and files in your data room. Data rooms are enabled for all Visible users. Log into Visible below to get started on your first data room below: Create a Data Room Check out a few of our other resources to help get you started: What should be in a data room? How to write a cover letter for your data room How to create a data room How to share your data room How to create a folder in your data room How to view the analytics in your data room Build and share your data room with Visible At Visible, we oftentimes compare a fundraise to a B2B sales and marketing funnel. At the top of your funnel, you are finding new investors. In the middle, you are nurturing and pitching potential investors. At the bottom of the funnel, you are working through diligence and ideally closing new investors. With the introduction of data rooms, you can now manage every aspect of your fundraising funnel with Visible. Find investors at the top of your funnel with our free investor database, Visible Connect Track your conversations and move them through your funnel with our Fundraising CRM Share your pitch deck and monthly updates with potential investors Organize and share your most vital fundraising documents with data rooms Manage your fundraise from start to finish with Visible. Give it a free try for 14 days here.

The Fundraising Funnel Raising venture capital often mirrors a traditional B2B sales & marketing funnel. At the top of your funnel, you are identifying potential investors through research, direct outreach, and intros from your peers. In the middle of the funnel, you are sharing your pitch deck, meeting with GPs, and perhaps the entire partnership. At the end of the funnel, there are (hopefully) multiple term sheets and negotiations ahead of closing. Just as a sales & marketing team has dedicated tools, so should a founder that is raising venture capital. By having a CRM in place to track and monitor the status of a raise, founders will be able to spend more time on what matters most — building their business. We’ve helped thousands of founders manage their raise with our Fundraising CRM. In order to help founders take their tracking to the next level, we are excited to announce our BCC email feature. Learn More Tracking Conversations with BCC With our BCC tool, founders will be able to simply copy & paste their unique BCC email address into any email. From here, the email will automatically be tracked with the corresponding contact in Visible. Check out an example below: This is great for cold emailing investors, nurturing investors, and staying in touch with current investors. To learn how to get BCC set up with your Visible account, head here. Related Resource: 3 Tips for Cold Emailing Potential Investors + Outreach Email Template

Understanding the performance and impact of your portfolio is critical for decision making, follow-on investments, and raising future funds. Available today, metric benchmarks will give investors instant insights into portfolio company operational performance. Visible will automatically provide investors the following: Total – The total sum for a given metric included a time series trend chart Minimum – The minimum value and respective company Maximum – The maximum value and respective company First Quartile 25% Median Quartile 50% Third Quartile 75% Investors will also be able to view benchmark data for any current segments or for a particular period. Quartiles Investors can also select any portfolio company to quickly view their performance relative to the respective portfolios. As always let us know if you have any questions or feedback! Up & to the right, Mike

We’re excited to share that our Multiple Funds feature is now live. This means you can now drill into your investment data and fund analytics with even more precision than before. Assign investments to different funds to view and compare individual fund analytics. Slice your data even further with custom segments. Answer questions like “How does the multiple for our SaaS companies from Fund I compare to the multiple for our SaaS companies in Fund II” in seconds. Get started with Multiple Funds within your Visible account or schedule a call here to learn more.

The pitch deck is the core marketing asset that jumpstarts any fundraising effort. It acts as the catalyst for connection, conversation, and relationship building. How Pitch Deck Sharing Works We talked to hundreds of founders, and three problems emerged around pitch deck sharing: I’m not sure how prepared a potential investor is before heading into a meeting. I’m under-networked. I share my deck to get meetings but want to understand who is engaged. I iterate on my deck every hour. Sharing the latest version is a pain. Introducing Visible Pitch Decks Today, we are launching Decks. A dead-simple way to host and share a pitch deck on Visible. Decks are completely integrated with our fundraising crm and leading investor updates platform. You’ll be able to set customized sharing permissions, notifications when investors view your deck, upload new versions without clicking a button, and understand how potential investors have engaged with your content. Just as a sales team has dedicated tools for their day-to-day, founders need dedicated tools for managing the most expensive asset they have, equity. Our community can now find investors, track a fundraise, and share a pitch deck directly from Visible and completely integrated. Want to see a Deck hosted on Visible in action? Take a look here. Whether we are building fundraising automation with our Zapier Connection or crafting integrations with companies like ProfitWell, we are driven by giving founders a better chance of success. It is going to be a very fun fall 😉 Up & to the right, Mike & The Visible Team

Keeping tabs on your SaaS metrics, like subscription growth, MRR movements, churn rates, etc., is vital to continued growth and improvement. We are excited to announce our direct integration with ProfitWell to do just that. About ProfitWell ProfitWell is a free tool that provides SaaS metrics insights, helps reduce churn and optimize pricing. Visualize your ProfitWell data directly in Visible, share it with your most important stakeholders, and combine it with other data sources to understand how your subscription growth is impacting your overall business. ProfitWell + Visible Our integration with ProfitWell allows you to sync 39 metrics to your Visible account (learn more about them here). Check out a few examples of different charts and data you can pull into Visible below: With ProfitWell, you can bring in all of your recurring revenue movements — new, upgraded, downgraded, churned. If you’d prefer to not share such granular data with your investors (and potential investors), you can also pull in your current recurring revenue which may look something like this:Alternatively, you can also chart your customer count movements to get a look at how your customer base is growing. How SaaS Metrics Help Fuel Growth ProfitWell has taken an added focus on leveraging your current customer retention to fuel growth. As they put it, “Acquisition is the weakest growth lever. How do we know this? We studied the levers—acquisition, retention, and monetization—of 512 SaaS companies. We found that monetization and retention have much higher revenue impacts than acquisition when considering the same level of impact across each growth lever.” Keep tabs on your retention directly in Visible. If you’d like to learn more, make sure to save a spot in our webinar with Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, as we discuss all things churn and retention. Learn more about connecting ProfitWell Don’t forget you can combine your ProfitWell data with any of our other integrations as well. P.S. We are hosting a webinar with Patrick Campbell, the CEO of ProfitWell, on July 7th to discuss all things net revenue retention and churn. Save your spot here.

Fundraising is a full-time job for startups. It’s a process most founders are running 24/7/365. The fundraising lifecycle typically has two parts: Actively Raising: Founders are actively raising new capital for their business. Hopefully, they are using a process to build momentum (check out this First Round article for great tips). Passively Fundraising: This is when founders are building relationships with future, upstream investors that might be a good fit for future funding events. The Fundraising Process We believe if founders run a great process when they are actively raising and build rapport with potential investors when they are passively raising they will raise faster, with better terms, and get back to building their business. Over the last year, we’ve built and improved (with features like custom properties, update sends to potential investors, and Visible Connect) our Fundraising CRM with features to make a founder’s next raise as efficient as possible. We are thrilled to announce our Zapier + Fundraising CRM integration. The integration will allow founders to fit fundraising into their daily workflow by using Zapier triggers to automatically add potential investors to their Visible Fundraising CRM. Visible + Zapier Examples Some examples of our favorite Zaps to get you started: Send email to a potential investor –> Add to Visible Pipeline Zapier Google Chrome Extension –> Add to Visible Pipeline Slack message –> Add to Visible Pipeline and more Give Visible + Zapier a Free Try Here are some templates to help get you started: To learn more about getting your Zapier connection setup with our Fundraising CRM, check out this post. If you have a Zap you’re using to automate your fundraise, we’d love to hear about it. Send a message to marketing at visible dot vc.

Building a company is difficult. Being a founder can almost feel impossible. As Naval Ravikant, Founder of AngelList, wrote, “It’s never been easier to start a company. It’s never been harder to build one.” Being a founder can be an incredibly lonely journey. There are very few people that truly know what it takes to build a company while being a strong leader. The best way to learn is from someone who has been there before. Being a founder can oftentimes be an “asymmetric experience.” As Seth Godin, business author, puts it: “In these asymmetric situations, it’s unlikely that you’re going to outsmart the experienced folks who have seen it all before. It’s unlikely that you’ll outlast them either. When you have to walk into one of these events, it pays to hire a local guide. Someone who knows as much as the other folks do, but who works for you instead.” We are excited to launch the Founders Forward Podcast to do just that — enable founders to learn from their peers and leaders that have been there before. Every week our Founder, Mike Preuss, will interview a founder or startup leader that has a specific area of genius. We will cover everything from sleep and wellness to alternative forms of financing. Why a podcast? Our mission at Visible is to give startups a better chance to succeed. As we and our brand continue to evolve, so will our content. We want to give founders the absolute best resources they need to move forward. We will launch a new episode of the Founders Forward Podcast (paying homage to our original newsletter name) for the next 6 weeks. We will use this to elevate our other content and give founders digestible takeaways. You can check out our first 3 episodes below (or listen on any podcast player): Episode #1 — Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and Founder of Casted Episode #2 — Amanda Goetz, CEO and Founder of House of Wise Episode #3 — Jeff Kahn, CEO and Founder of Rise Science How can you help? This is our first season and foray into podcasting so any feedback is very much welcome! If you have any suggestions, questions, or would like to recommend a guest, send us a message to foundersforward at visible dot vc. To stay up-to-date with the Founders Forward Podcast subscribe to the Visible Weekly Newsletter below: