Write investor updates

A strong investor narrative explains, in a few sentences, what problem you solve, why now is the moment to solve it, why your company is the one to do it, and what the next round of money will let you prove. It's the spine of the pitch deck, and it should also be the spine of every update you send before the raise.

Kite drafts the narrative from its research on your company and market. It knows your positioning and your customers, it has researched your competitors and how they describe themselves, and it can look up recent funding rounds in your category. From that, it proposes a version of the story and the milestones that would make it convincing. For a company selling scheduling software to dental clinics, the narrative might be that clinics lose a fifth of their bookings to phone tag, that a new generation of clinic owners now expects to book online, and that the next round will prove the product can spread from single clinics to clinic groups. The milestones that prove it might be the first three clinic groups signed and a lower cost to win each clinic.

You edit the narrative until it sounds like how you'd pitch it, and Kite saves it in your team's knowledge base. From then on, each monthly update reports progress against those milestones. When you start the raise, your investors have read a year of evidence for the same story, and Kite can turn the narrative into the opening of your deck.

An investor update is only as good as its facts, so Kite collects them from the systems where they live rather than from memory. It reads each source for the month and compares it with the month before.

What Kite pulls together depends on what you've connected:

• Revenue and customers from Stripe. Kite reads your subscriptions, charges, refunds, and cancellations to work out the month's revenue, new paying customers, and the customers who left. It reports revenue in each currency you sell in.
• Pipeline from your CRM. With HubSpot or another CRM connected, Kite reads the deals that opened, moved forward, closed, or were lost.
• Website traffic and signups. Kite uses its built-in analytics for a site it hosts, or a connected product such as Google Analytics, to report visitors, signups, and where they came from.
• Marketing work and results. Kite's initiatives board records what it shipped and what it stopped. Its knowledge base holds the results of campaigns and experiments, so it can say what moved the numbers.

Some facts aren't in any of those systems. Kite asks you for them in one short message: cash in the bank, monthly burn, runway, hires and departures, and anything that happened in a meeting Kite didn't see. If your team works with Kite in Slack, you can also ask it there to search the public channels it has joined for launches, customer wins, and decisions it wasn't told about directly.

A monthly investor update should include a two-line summary, the same small set of metrics every month, the main wins, the main misses, and specific asks. Investors read dozens of these, so a familiar shape lets them find what they need in under two minutes.

Kite writes each update in this order:

• Summary. Two or three sentences on how the month went and the one thing that matters most.
• Key metrics. The same handful of numbers every month, each with last month's figure beside it. For a subscription business that's usually revenue, growth rate, paying customers, cash, burn, and runway.
• Wins. What went well, tied to the milestones in your narrative where it fits.
• Misses. What didn't go to plan and what you're doing about it.
• Asks. Two or three specific requests, such as an introduction to a named company, a candidate for an open role, or advice on a pricing decision.
• Thanks. A line for any investor whose help came through since the last update.

Kite keeps the metric set fixed from month to month. Changing which numbers you report is one of the fastest ways to lose an investor's trust, because it looks like you're hiding the ones you dropped. When a metric needs to change, Kite says so in the update and explains why.

Kite also writes the asks to be easy to act on. "Intros to dental groups" is hard for an investor to do anything with. "An introduction to the head of operations at a dental group with ten or more clinics in the Midwest" is something an investor can forward in a minute. Kite uses your ideal customer profile and its research on target accounts to make each ask that specific.

Explain a bad month near the top of the update, say plainly what happened and why, and describe what you're changing. Investors expect bad months. What damages trust is a bad month that's buried, explained vaguely, or left for them to discover later.

Kite writes the bad news with the same structure every time: the number, the cause, and the response. Say revenue fell from $48,000 to $44,500 because two of your larger customers cancelled after their own budgets were cut. Kite reads the cancellations in Stripe, checks whether those customers shared a size, industry, or plan, and writes the miss in a few direct sentences. It then states what you're doing about it, such as shifting outbound toward the customer segment that stayed, and it names the metric investors should watch next month to judge whether the fix worked.

Kite keeps the summary to the same length as any other month and lists only the wins that really happened. A bad month that's explained well often earns more help than a good month, because it gives investors a clear problem they might be able to solve.

The most useful habit in investor relations is sending the update on the same schedule every month, and Kite can run that schedule for you. You agree on a day, such as the third business day of each month, and Kite starts the work then without being asked.

On that day, Kite gathers the month's numbers, writes the draft, and sends you the short list of facts it still needs. You review the draft in the Kite web app or in Slack, change anything you like, and approve it. With Gmail connected, Kite can leave the finished update in your Drafts folder, addressed to your investor list, so you send it yourself. Or it can send it from your address once you approve it.

After the update goes out, investors reply with introductions, advice, and questions. With your Gmail inbox connected, Kite can watch for those replies and tell you which ones need you, then draft a response for you to approve. It keeps track of each ask and who offered to help, so next month's update can thank the people who came through and say what came of the introduction.