The Importance of Updating Your Investors and Stakeholders

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Invest Dream. I'm Pankaj and today we're going to talk about the importance of updating your investors and stakeholders on a regular basis coming up right after this. So there are many good reasons to update your investors regularly on what's happening with your startup. Some VCs and angels like monthly updates, some like quarterly, and others are fine with ad hoc information as well. One founder I work with set up a WhatsApp group of his investors and just messages whenever he wants something or he wants to share some information or update us on what's happening. That's perfectly fine. Now the point is that it helps to build confidence when when an entrepreneur takes ownership of updating their investors and other stakeholders and doesn't wait for investors to ask for updates. Now, including other stakeholders is also a really important thing because stakeholders don't necessarily have to be investors. They might be potential customers, they might be mentors, they might be folks that could be investors sometime in the future. And you do want to share different information with each of them, but that's a separate issue. Today we're just going to talk about the importance of updating people regularly. In addition, when a startup is young and relationships with investors are new, it's even more important to invest in building that relationship. However, an entrepreneur's first responsibility and passion is to move the startup ahead. Regular investor updates help solve both problems to a large degree without the founders or founders needing to take time away for one on one calls or one on one meetings from investors. Existing investors, that is so one. It helps continue to build trust when you're updating investors. 2. It keeps investors interested and excited about what's happening with your startup. 3. If things aren't going so well, it isn't a surprise to investors. You know, bad surprises aren't a good thing for anyone and frequently end up with frayed relationships. 4. If you need help with something, this is your chance to ask your investors for help. It's especially important when things aren't going as planned. 5. When you take another swing at raising more money, they're more likely to help you or participate some things that you want to include in your investor update and like I said, I'll share a sample in the show notes below. Of course, it's important that you modify the the example to suit your business and include your KPIs and adjust for frequency based on whatever your investors expect or want. Getting a routine for investor updates going also helps you and your team focus on the targets you've laid out together, as well as keeping you apprised of situations that may be brewing, having a good handle on your KPIs is also just as important. So this is a really, really important thing that a lot of founders kind of trail off on. Information rights also plays a factor in who you're sending these updates to. My opinion is that yeah, there are certain things that should only be included for folks that have information rights, but there are other general things that you should be sharing with all of your investors on how things are going. I hope this was helpful and I hope all of you are sending out regular investor updates and stakeholder updates, and I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions on what an investor update looks like. Please add them to the comment section below. I'm sure other founders would also appreciate that. And if you have questions that you'd like to ask me, please put them in the comments below. I will try to answer as many questions as possible. Thanks again for joining me on investream and talk to you guys again soon.