Getting structured, consistent updates from your portfolio companies is one of the most important — and often most painful — parts of investor operations. Whether you’re managing a growth-stage fund with dozens of companies or just getting organized as an early-stage firm, the ability to centralize performance data is critical to helping your team, your LPs, and your founders succeed.
That’s where Visible comes in. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to build a streamlined, scalable reporting workflow using Visible — one that gets you clean, structured data with minimal back-and-forth and maximum insight.
Step 1: Finalize Your Metrics and Properties
The foundation of any great data collection process in Visible is your data structure — that means defining the metrics and properties you want your portfolio companies to report on.
- Metrics are time-series KPIs (e.g., Revenue, Burn, Runway).
- Properties are qualitative fields that give context (e.g. Highlights, Lowlights, Asks)
As an investor, you have full control over what data you collect. You can tailor metrics and properties to your investment strategy or reporting needs. Once a company submits a request, their responses will be mapped automatically to these fields in your account.
Learn how to create Portfolio Metrics →
Learn how to create and edit Properties →
Pro Tip: Start with a simple set of 10–15 key metrics and 3–5 properties. This gives you high-signal data without overwhelming your founders.
Step 2 (Optional but Recommended): Invite Companies to Visible
While founders don’t need a Visible account to complete your request (they can always fill it out via a secure link sent to their inbox), inviting them to create a free account unlocks some advantages:
- They can view and refer to past data, so they’re not starting from scratch each time.
- They can pre-fill requests with AI, saving time and improving accuracy.
- They can save their request progress as a draft and come back at any time or collaborate with teammates as needed.
- They can turn the same data into investor updates that can be used to nurture relationships with current and prospective investors.
- They can update their metrics in Visible and then link them directly to investor requests. It’s faster, accurate, and lets them reuse their data across updates and dashboards.
In short, you make their life easier — and that makes them more likely to complete requests consistently.
How to invite portfolio companies →
Why a free Visible account helps founders →
Step 3: Create Your Request
Now it’s time to build your first request. Visible’s Request Builder lets you create fully customized, recurring (or one-time) forms that ask for exactly the metrics and properties you care about.
You control:
- Which companies receive it
- Which metrics/properties are requested
- The frequency (e.g. quarterly, monthly)
- Deadlines and reminders
How to build a recurring request →
Best Practices:Most investors ask for data quarterly and request 10–15 metrics per company. This keeps the lift manageable for founders and gets you a strong dataset.We also see that investors achieve the highest response rates when they send ~5 notifications for the request. Typically there are two notifications prior to the request, one on the due date, and two after the due date.
Pro Tip for Your Portfolio Companies: If a founder is using Visible, they can leverage AI to auto-fill the request by uploading related files and then they can repurpose that data into an update for all their investors — saving hours of work.
Step 4: Supplement with the AI Inbox
Even with structured requests, founders will often send insights via email. Instead of letting those updates live in your inbox, use Visible’s AI Inbox.
Just forward an email to your unique AI inbox address, and Visible will:
- Match the email to the correct company
- Extract the metrics
- Create an AI generated summary
- Add the metrics to a company’s profile automatically
This turns unstructured emails into usable, structured data.
Pro Tip: Add your AI inbox address as a contact, or set up auto-forwarding from a shared team email to streamline this process.
Step 5: Pre-Fill Data to Save Time for Founders
Already have a data point from the AI Inbox or that you’ve added manually? Save your founder from entering it again by pre-filling the field in their next request.
This:
- Reduces friction
- Encourages higher response rates
- Improves data consistency
How to pre-fill responses with existing data →
Best Practice: Even if there is not currently data associated with your portfolio companies today, we recommend toggling on pre-fill existing data to ensure that metrics will populate if they are added in the future.
Bring It All Together
By following these five steps, you can build a data collection process that serves as the foundation for your reporting, portfolio analysis, and centralized data management — giving you the structured data you need, without creating manual overhead.
With Visible, you can:
- Define your data structure once
- Automate recurring collection
- Capture both structured and unstructured updates
- Give founders an easy way to report — and benefit from the process
A well-run data collection process doesn’t just help you track performance. It builds trust with your portfolio and gives you the data to help them grow.
Want help setting this up for your fund? Reach out to our team or explore more best practices at support@visible.vc
