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Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
The Next RoundOptimizing Your Next Financing with Investor Reporting
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Business has only two kinds of key resources — knowledge resources and money.Peter Drucker - Managing for Results
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Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
How effective is your company at attracting and retaining capital and talent?
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Investors want to work with founders who…
… take seriously the fact that you are deploying the capital of other people.Marc Andreessen - Interview with Fortune’s Dan Primack
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Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Investors want to work with founders who…
… grasp the importance of management, money, market and above all else momentum.Mark Suster - The 4 Main Things Investors Look For
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Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Why Effective Investor Relations Matter
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Public vs. Private Market Investor Relations
For public companies, frequent financial disclosures and the reporting of certain well-defined metrics are a requirement.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Public vs. Private Market Investor Relations
In the private market, this isn’t the case — reporting and metrics standards and consistency are lacking, leading to misunderstandings — and occasionally fraud — in fundraising, hiring, and operating.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
How much time until we need to hit the fundraising trail? How much time until the bank account hits zero? How long until we can reach profitability? When will the funding market dry up?
You are fighting a race against the clock.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
And against an unwilling market.
Bitcoin and blockchain companies have another, possibly even greater, existential question that they need to try to answer when raising money and planning their futures. When will bitcoin and blockchain “arrive”?
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
If you aren’t getting attention from a VC, you aren’t going to get money from that VC either. When a VC writes off an investment, either emotionally or literally on their schedule of investments, they are closing their wallet to it too.
Fred Wilson, Orphaned Investments
“Even against companies in the same portfolios…
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Consistent and comparable investor updates truly help companies stand out in a market where investor attention is scarce.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
In a survey of dozens of top Seed and Series A stage investors, respondents indicated that, based on historical portfolio data, companies who consistently provided business updates to investors were 2x more successful in attaining follow-on funding.
The numbers support this.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Regular investor updates signal an active and engaged management team.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Over time, signals turn into patterns and investors — for better or worse — rely on pattern matching to streamline decision-making.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Transparency through consistent communication creates accountability and a deeper sense of ownership.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Investors are an extension of your team. Keeping them engaged leads to intros to talent, customers, and other investors.
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Building a process for the long term
1. Once a month — plus intermittent updates for major milestones — is great
2. Stop asynchronicity — take a “one to many” approach 3. Use comparable metrics — cash on hand, net burn, runway, your Most Valuable Metric
4. Combine numbers with context. A short narrative on what has changed works well
5. Make specific asks
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Good metrics should be actionable and drive successful behavior.David Skok, Matrix Partners
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Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Trying to track — and disseminate — every single data point within your company creates noise with nothing to act on. Read any startup post-mortem and you’ll quickly realize the negative impact that lack of focus can have on a company.
What does success look like?
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
What does success look like at Visible?
Number of Updates Sent
•Shows we have activated a user and that they “get” it
•Means we are finding additional use cases (beyond monthly updates)
•Indicates a good match between our messaging, our product, and user expectations
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Early Stage Most Valuable MetricsBuffer
Product Page Visits
Our core metric that we use to tell if we’re doing a good job is how many
people are actually clicking through and
visiting product pages. That’s how we know
people are continuing to find value in what we’re doing and everything
follows after that.
•Raised $7.5MM from firms like a16z, SV Angel and Google Ventures
•Collaborative, community-based business model
•Based in San Francisco
Buffer Monthly Recurring Revenue
Understanding MRR helps Buffer accurately
describe the type of revenue they are
receiving, factoring in annual payments,
monthly subscriptions and refunds and fees.
•Raised $3.9MM from investors like Collaborative Fund and Vegas Tech Fund
•SaaS business model •Remote team based
around the world
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Early Stage Most Valuable MetricsBuffer
WAU Growth
As a seed stage company, week over
week growth is important for Charlie as
it helps them understand how effectively different distribution channels -
referrals, press, organic - are performing.
• Investors include Hyde Park Ventures, Confluence Capital, and Lightbank
•SaaS business model •Tool to compile dynamic
one-pagers
Buffer Number of Live Offers
Kickfurther focuses on how many “live offers”
they have on the platform at a given time.
Their effectiveness at having offers live directly affects every single other
KPI they track - like revenue, user
acquisition, and user activation.
•Member of Boomtown Accelerator in Boulder
•Marketplace business model
• Inventory financing crowdfunding for small businesses
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Growth Stage Most Valuable MetricsBuffer
Net Promoter Score
NPS is a crucial metric for Ecommerce
businesses who rely heavily on return
customers and word of mouth referrals. Warby Parker sees NPS as the best leading indicator for the health of their
brand and by extension, their business.
•Raised over $100MM from firms like First Round and BoxGroup and valued at $1.2B
•Ecommerce business + brick and mortar business model
Buffer Growth in # of companies to 2k
messages
For Slack, the magic number for user retention is 2,000 messages. Once
a company hits that number, they are
extremely likely to stick around as a customer (93% of teams that hit that number still use
Slack today).
•Valued at almost $3B after raising money from firms like The Social + Capital Partnership and Accel Partners
•Self-service SaaS business model
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Growth Stage Most Valuable MetricsBuffer
Sharing
Buzzfeed believes that shared content is good
content and that editorial success in
today’s media landscape is all about word of
mouth (sharing). Sharing as a metric is a digital
proxy for the previously mentioned Net Promoter Score.
•Raised over $300MM from firms like NEA and Lerer Hippeau Ventures
•Media business model
Buffer Number of Nights Rented
Liquidity is key to the success of a
marketplace. For Airbnb, the number or nights
rented and the growth of that number
demonstrates how well they are attracting new
marketplace participants and then matching them with people on the other
side.
• Went through YCombinator and now valued at over $25B on a reported $900MM in revenue
• Marketplace business model
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Sarah is the CEO of a SaaS Company She needs to share updates and key performance data with her many stakeholders that are important to the business.
Team
Candidates
Sarah
Advisors
Investors
Customers
Weekly Updates
ProductUpdates
Potential Investors
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
With Visible, she can centralize her data in one place…
Existing Integrations
Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
..and understands how her stakeholders are engaged.
visible.vcVisible.vc | Private & Confidential - All rights reserved - Visible.vc, Inc.
Questions? Want More? Contact:
Brett Bivens [email protected] - 269.419.6059