Why we send our friends investor updates

For the past 5 months we’ve been sending a list of 33 of our best friends (friendvestors) monthly updates about Yala, our clever social media scheduling bot. I mean, serious updates — including all our plans, metrics, and dirty laundry.

Our friends became our confidants, advisors and promoters. They become invested in our startup — not with money, but with time and energy.

These “friendvestor” updates have been incredibly awesome for us, driving action and ensuring we keep on top of our business. In my opinion, every side project, small business or design studio should take the time to compose thorough updates, even if they don’t have investors demanding them.

I’d like to share my framework for composing these updates and the philosophy behind them with you.

First off, what do our friendvestor updates include?

• Product changes that occurred over the past month as well as the philosophy that guided them
• A set of growth and retention metrics
• Miscellaneous articles, blog posts, features, partnerships and cool things that happened at Yala in the past month
• Our plan for the upcoming month/months

Scroll down to the bottom of this article to see our very own update from October. 😊

Such updates are usually reserved for a startup’s investors, advisors and other stakeholders. These people need to know what’s going on because of their involvement in the company. Yala doesn’t have any external stakeholders, so no one needs to receive our updates. No one needs to keep track of what’s going on at Yala.

Except for us, that is. We need to keep an eye on what’s going on at Yala. And there’s no better way to keep ourselves accountable than composing a monthly rundown of everything we’ve accomplished in the past month, including all the soddy details.

Composing friendvestor updates

For me, writing these updates is an almost meditative experience. Here’s my process:

1. I take a look at Trello to see all the cards we’ve moved from the “Coming up” stack to “Ready for deployment”. I list the major ones and explain the reasons we’ve chosen to focus our efforts and resources on building these features before others.
2. I scrape all the different data points from Mixpanel, comparing them to last month’s data. I dig in deeper to see if there are any additional metrics that can prove useful and insightful to add to the mix.
3. Mixpanel also provides me with our retention metrics. Since Yala is very young, I check 1- and 2- week retention for our entire userbase and for our latest cohort to see if we’re improving.
4. Looking at our blog and social accounts, I choose the most important things that happened at Yala this month and add them in.
5. Our Trello roadmap and constant conversations with the team ensure I always have a pretty good clue about where we’re heading next, and putting this into writing helps me be more focused on what I need to do next to achieve our goals.

Formatting friendvestor updates

I find that the format of the updates plays a major role in their effectivity. At first, I used to send longer, wittier updates. With time, I learned to tone them down. Here are a few tips I’d recommend for composing your own updates:

1. Pool your updates into 3–5 different sections and adhere to them. This adds a lot of coherency to your updates.
2. Be consistent. If you’ve tracked a metric last month, don’t discard it this month unless you’ve come to the conclusion it’s absolutely irrelevant. Updates are about retrospection as much as anything.
3. Don’t sugarcoat anything! I can’t stress this enough. If a metric hasn’t been performing as expected, include it in your update and draw attention to the fact that it’s been misperforming. Remember to fail hard and fail fast.
4. In my experience, using bullet points for everything helps keep the update super-focused and easy to skim.
5. Don’t be too serious. These need to be enjoyable to read and more importantly, fun to write. Throw in the odd emoji, find quirky headlines, add some jokes. It’s all cool.

Air your dirty laundry

It’s easy to be tempted to keep these updates to yourself, especially when things don’t look too bright. The process is, after all, a self-meditative one. In my experience, though, sending updates to real people is crucial.

1. They force you to do a good job. People tend to skimp work that no one will ever set eyes on.
2. They become involved in your startup. You make friends by sharing. People who’ve been exposed to the inner workings of your startup are its most supportive allies.
3. They offer feedback. Startups validate their product by exposing it to users; They can validate their business by exposing it to friends.