Most investor updates are either too long or too vague
If you've raised money for your SaaS, you've probably sat down on the first Monday of the month and thought: "I should probably send an update to my investors." Then you stare at a blank email for 20 minutes. You write three paragraphs about a feature you shipped. You paste in a screenshot of your Stripe dashboard. You hit send and immediately wonder if that was useful to anyone.
And if you haven't raised yet but plan to, here's the thing: writing monthly updates before you even have investors is one of the smartest habits you can build. It forces you to actually look at your numbers. Every month. No skipping.
The problem isn't that founders don't want to send updates. It's that nobody shows you what a good one actually looks like. Most advice boils down to "be transparent and consistent." Thanks, very helpful. So let's fix that.
Think of it like a monthly health checkup
An investor update is nothing but a short, structured note that tells people who care about your business what happened last month, what you learned, and what you need help with.
Think of it like a doctor's visit for your company. The doctor doesn't need your entire medical history every time. They need vitals (your metrics), a quick conversation about how you're feeling (your narrative), and any specific concerns (your asks). In and out. Five minutes.
That's exactly how your investor update should work. Vitals, narrative, asks. Done.
But most founders either turn it into a novel (three pages about a redesign nobody asked about) or a dashboard screenshot with zero context. Both miss the point. Your investors are busy. They have 20 portfolio companies. They want to scan your update in under 5 minutes and know: is this company healthy, growing, struggling, or on fire?
What to include (and what to skip)
Before I show you the template, let's talk about the building blocks. A good investor update has exactly three sections. Not five. Not seven. Three.
1. Metrics section (the vitals)
This is the part most founders either overdo or skip entirely. You don't need 15 KPIs. You need 5-7 numbers that tell the story of your month.
Here's what to include:
- MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) — the single number that says how big the business is right now
- Net MRR change — did you grow or shrink, and by how much?
- New customers — is acquisition working?
- Churned customers — how many did you lose?
- Customer churn rate — what percentage of customers cancelled (always pair this with the absolute number, because "10% churn" means very different things at 10 customers vs 1,000)
- ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) — how much does each customer pay on average?
That's it. Six numbers. If you want to add one more, make it your Quick Ratio (new + expansion revenue divided by contraction + churned revenue). It's a single number that captures whether you're growing efficiently. Above 4 is excellent. Below 1 means you're shrinking.
What to skip: LTV, CAC, NPS, DAU/MAU, trial conversion rates, and anything you'd need to squint at a spreadsheet for 30 minutes to compute. If a metric doesn't help your investor understand your month in one glance, leave it out.
2. Narrative section (the story)
Numbers without context are just numbers. The narrative section is where you give your investors the "so what."
Keep it to 3-5 short bullet points or paragraphs covering:
- What went well — new feature shipped, partnership signed, big customer landed
- What didn't go well — be honest here. Investors respect founders who name problems early, not founders who hide them until the next board meeting
- What you learned — this is the most underrated part. It shows you're thinking, not just doing
The trick is to connect the narrative to the numbers. If MRR dropped, don't just say "MRR decreased." Say "MRR decreased 4% because we lost 3 customers on the Starter plan. Two cited pricing, one switched to a competitor. We're testing a new onboarding flow to address retention."
That's way more useful than a red arrow pointing down.
3. Asks section (the help)
This is the part most founders skip, and it's actually the most valuable. Your investors have networks, experience, and context you don't. But they can't help if they don't know what you need.
Good asks are specific:
- "Looking for an intro to [specific person or company]"
- "Hiring a senior backend engineer, any referrals?"
- "Evaluating whether to add annual plans. Has anyone in the portfolio done this well?"
Bad asks are vague: "Let me know if you can help with anything." That's not an ask. That's a formality.
How often and how long
Frequency: Monthly. No exceptions. Even if it was a bad month. Especially if it was a bad month. Going silent is the fastest way to make investors nervous.
Length: Your investor should be able to read the entire update in under 5 minutes. That means roughly 300-500 words of narrative plus your metrics table. If you're writing more than that, you're writing a blog post, not an update.
Format: Plain email works fine. No need for fancy templates or PDF attachments for the update itself (though attaching a one-page metrics report is a nice touch, more on that in a minute).
A concrete investor update template
Here's a template you can copy and adapt. I'm going to use sample numbers so you can see how it reads with real data.
Subject line
[Company Name] — March 2026 Update
Keep it simple. Your investors should be able to find these in their inbox by searching your company name + "update."
The email
Hi everyone,
Here's the March 2026 update for Acme SaaS.
METRICS
-------
MRR: $8,450 (up from $7,900)
Net MRR Change: +$550 (+7.0%)
New Customers: 6
Churned Customers: 2 of 38 (5.3% churn rate)
ARPU: $201
Quick Ratio: 3.1
WHAT WENT WELL
--------------
- Shipped the new onboarding flow. Early numbers show
activation improved from 40% to 58%.
- Landed our first annual customer ($2,400/yr plan).
Exploring whether to push annual pricing more broadly.
- Blog post on MRR calculation drove 1,200 visits
and 3 signups.
WHAT DIDN'T GO WELL
--------------------
- Lost 2 customers on the Starter plan. Both cited
"not using it enough." Need to investigate whether
this is a value delivery problem or wrong ICP.
- Delayed the Stripe API integration by 2 weeks.
Underestimated the webhook complexity.
WHAT I LEARNED
--------------
- Customers who upload their first report within 48 hours
of signing up have 3x higher retention. Doubling down
on time-to-first-report as the key activation metric.
ASKS
----
- Intro to [name] at [company] — they're solving a
similar data pipeline problem and I'd love to compare
approaches.
- If you know any part-time marketers comfortable with
developer-focused SaaS, I'm exploring a contractor hire.
Full metrics report attached as PDF.
Thanks,
[Your name]
That's the whole thing. It took maybe 10 minutes to write once you have the numbers ready. Your investors can scan it in 3 minutes. They know exactly where you stand.
How to frame a bad month
Here's where most founders freeze. MRR went down. Churn spiked. A big customer left. And now you don't want to send the update at all.
Don't do that. Skipping the update is worse than any bad number.
Instead, lead with the numbers honestly, then immediately follow with why and what you're doing about it. Investors don't expect every month to be up and to the right. They expect you to understand what's happening and have a plan.
A bad month framed well:
MRR: $7,200 (down from $7,900)
Net MRR Change: -$700 (-8.9%)
Churned Customers: 5 of 35 (14.3% churn rate)
"Tough month. We lost 5 customers, including our largest account ($400/mo). Three churned within their first 60 days, which confirms the onboarding problem I flagged last month. I'm making onboarding improvements the sole focus for April. Will share results in the next update."
That's a founder who is on top of things. Compare that to radio silence, or worse, "Things are going great!" when they clearly aren't.
The metrics are the hard part (and they don't have to be)
If you read that template and thought "the writing part seems easy enough, but I don't have those numbers ready," you're not alone. That's the actual bottleneck.
Most solo founders I talk to don't skip investor updates because they're lazy. They skip them because getting accurate metrics takes 30-45 minutes of spreadsheet work. You have to export from Stripe, figure out who's new vs churned, normalize annual plans, calculate churn rate with the right denominator... it adds up.
And when something takes 45 minutes and feels tedious, you find reasons to skip it. "I'll send it next week." Then next week becomes next month. Then you haven't sent an update in a quarter.
This is exactly the problem I built MetricMint to solve. You upload your Stripe CSV, and it computes your MRR, net change, churn rate, ARPU, Quick Ratio, and customer breakdown automatically. The whole thing takes about 2 minutes. You get a downloadable PDF report that's designed to be attached directly to an investor update.
So instead of 45 minutes of spreadsheet work plus 10 minutes of writing, it's 2 minutes of uploading plus 10 minutes of writing. The metrics section of your update basically writes itself because you're just pulling numbers from the report.
I'm not saying you need a tool for this. You can absolutely do it by hand. The template above works regardless. But if the metrics are the thing stopping you from sending consistent updates, removing that friction makes a real difference.
So here's the takeaway
Let's recap what makes a good investor update:
- Three sections only: metrics, narrative, asks. No fluff.
- 5-7 key metrics: MRR, net change, new customers, churned customers, churn rate, ARPU. Add Quick Ratio if you want a bonus point.
- Connect the story to the numbers. Don't just report. Explain.
- Include specific asks. Your investors want to help. Tell them how.
- Send it monthly, no matter what. Bad months deserve updates too. Especially bad months.
- Keep it under 5 minutes to read. If it's longer, cut it.
Personally, I think the investor update is one of the most underrated founder habits. Not because investors demand it, but because it forces you to sit down, look at your numbers, and actually think about what happened this month. That 15 minutes of reflection compounds over time.
If you want to skip the spreadsheet part and get your metrics ready in minutes instead, MetricMint generates a clean monthly report from your Stripe data. Free during beta.