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Use it when
Every month, to keep investors informed in a short email with the numbers, the honest news and specific asks they can help with
Who it's for
FounderExecutive
Filled example
The template filled in for a made-up company, so you can see what good looks like.
Fernhill investor update, September 2026
Fernhill · October 4, 2026
TL;DR:
MRR grew 9% to $148,000, driven by the Routes launch.
Burn up to $210,000 as we hired two engineers; runway is 19 months.
We lost our largest pilot (Summit Foods) to a build-in-house decision. Asks: two grocery chain intros and a VP Sales referral.
KPIs
MRR
$148,000
▲ +9%
Burn
$210,000
▲ +11%
Runway
19 months
MRR by monthView data
month
mrr
Jun
112k
Jul
121k
Aug
136k
Sep
148k
Highlights
Routes is live. 23 grocers turned it on in the first two weeks, adding $9,400 MRR. Routes customers have 30% higher expansion in their first month than our ordering-only customers.
Net revenue retention hit 118%, up from 109% in Q2, mostly from stores adding delivery vans.
Two key hires joined: Nadia Volkov (Staff Engineer, ex-Instacart routing) and Ben Osei (Product Designer).
Lowlights
Summit Foods is not converting. After a four month pilot they chose to build routing in house. They were 6% of pipeline. We learned that chains above 300 vans want an API, not an app, and that is not on our roadmap this year.
Sales cycle slipped from 34 to 41 days, because September is budget season for grocers. We expect it to recover in November but are watching it.
One outage on September 22 delayed morning route plans for 2 hours for 40 stores. We credited affected customers and added a fallback planner.
Asks
Intro: to anyone at Natural Grocers or Lowes Foods operations, for Routes pilots.
Hiring: a VP Sales who has sold into regional grocery or food distribution. Referrals welcome; we pay a $10,000 bonus.
Advice: if you have portfolio companies that have priced a public API on top of an app, we would value 30 minutes with their product lead.
Thank you
Thank you to Elaine at Lumen Ventures for the Mendez Markets intro last month; they signed for 11 stores.
The template
Show the blank template
Investor update
[workspace] · [date]
TL;DR:three bullets a busy investor reads in ten seconds.
KPIs
The same metrics every month, so the trend is the story.
Bind a tile to your numbers with source: finance.mrr (Workspace → Reporting → Data sources); refreshes arrive as suggestions.
MRR
$0
▲ +0%
Burn
$0
▲ 0%
Runway
0 months
MRR by monthView data
month
mrr
Jan
0
Feb
0
Mar
0
Highlights
[Highlight]
Lowlights
Investors trust founders who share the bad news early.
[Lowlight]
Asks
Specific and easy to say yes to.
Intro: to [person/company] for [reason]
Hiring: [role]
Thank you
One line of thanks.
Questions
How long should it be?
Readable in two minutes; link to the data room for detail
What if it was a bad month?
Send it anyway and on time; lowlights first is what builds investor trust
What makes a good ask?
Specific and easy to act on, like an intro to a named person for a stated reason
How do investors get it?
Paste the addresses of investors who agreed to receive it into a workspace list, publish, then use Set up sending on the doc
Who can see the published page?
Anyone with its link, so keep the data room for anything you would not want forwarded
Can I check it first?
Send me a test in the send dialog emails only you; after the send you see who opened it and how far they read
Can the numbers fill themselves?
Bind a tile to your numbers with source: finance.mrr from Workspace Data sources; refreshes arrive as suggestions, not silent edits
Fill it with your agent
Connect Claude to reph over MCP, then paste this. The draft arrives as suggestions you accept or reject section by section. How to connect Claude.
Find my reph doc "Investor update" with search_docs, then read it with read_doc. Draft this month's update from the finance close (MRR, burn, cash), CRM pipeline report and hiring tracker, kept to one screen. Find last month's update with search_docs and call get_reader_signals to see which asks got clicks. File it with suggest_edit, one replace_section op per section (heading line kept) so each can be accepted alone. Ask each open question (unclosed numbers, asks without a named target) with add_comment quoting that section's heading line, then call request_review with a one-line summary.