A founder recently emailed me:

“I’ve met a ton of investors but I’m not raising right now and I’m worried they’ll forget about me. I’ve debated sending a monthly update but feel lost on the balance between saying too much vs saying nothing.”
If you’re in a similar situation, this is for you.

If you haven’t read it yet, we recommend starting with Investor Updates Aren’t for Your Investors. They’re for You, which explains why this practice compounds into one of the highest-leverage fundraising habits a founder can build.

Investors meet an endless stream of impressive founders every week. Winning mindshare with them is hard. One of the easiest, highest-leverage ways to stay top of mind—especially when you’re pre-revenue or not actively raising—is a simple, consistent monthly investor update.

But what do you actually say when you don’t have MRR charts and growth curves to show off?

Let’s break it down.

Why Send Updates to Prospective Investors When You’re Not Raising?

A good investor update does three things for a pre-revenue company:

1. Builds trust and credibility
You’re training investors to see you as someone who executes, communicates, and follows through.

2. Creates a sense of momentum
Even without revenue, you can show meaningful forward motion in the things that eventually create revenue.

3. Keeps you in the conversation
When an investor thinks, “Who should I talk to in X space?” or “Who might I pre-empt for a round?”, you want your name to show up in their mental short list.

Each month’s update is a new chapter in your narrative. You’re showing how the story is unfolding, step by step.

You’re Writing for Prospective Investors

For this version, we’re focused only on prospective investors—people you’ve met (maybe at a conference), been introduced to, or who might be great partners later, but who aren’t on your cap table yet.

Your goals with this audience:

  • Remind them who you are and what you’re building
  • Show that you’re making real progress (even pre-revenue)
  • Make it easy for them to help when they can

That’s it. You’re not pitching in every email; you’re building the relationship so that when you do raise, the conversation starts at Chapter 5 instead of Page 1.

What Counts as “Traction” When You’re Pre-Revenue?

Founders often assume “traction” only means revenue, growth, or user charts that look like a ski slope.

In reality, especially at the pre-revenue stage, traction is a broad catch-all for measurable, meaningful, forward movement toward product–market fit and a real business.

Your job is to define and communicate what that looks like for your company.

Here are examples of pre-revenue traction you can talk about in your updates:

Team & Advisors

  • New hires (full-time, part-time, contractors).
  • New advisors, especially those with relevant domain, product, or GTM experience.
  • Leverage pedigree where appropriate (Ex. Computer Science at MIT; previously exited founder; early hire at Uber, etc).

Customer & Market Learning

  • Key insights from customer discovery calls, demos, or user research.
  • Patterns you’re seeing in feedback, pains, or objections.
  • Experiments you ran (landing pages, interviews, prototypes) and what you learned.

Design Partners, LOIs, and Pilots

  • Signed LOIs/MOUs/design-partner agreements.
  • Organizations committed to pilot or trial your product once it’s ready.
  • Early data or qualitative feedback from any pilots.

Strategic Partnerships

  • Collaborations with organizations who serve the same target user.
  • Co-marketing or referral relationships.
  • Integrations or product partnerships that will matter later.

Product Progress

  • Features shipped or major milestones (alpha, beta, v1).
  • Screens, prototypes, or UI flows—investors love seeing demos.
  • Improvements in reliability, performance, or UX that unlock new use cases.

Clinical / Regulatory / Compliance Progress (if relevant)

  • Status updates on any regulatory work you’re doing.
  • Approvals, certifications, or milestones hit.
  • Key conversations with regulators or external experts.

Other Company News

  • Press mentions or podcasts.
  • Thought leadership you or your team published.
  • Events, accelerators, or programs you’ve been accepted into or attended.

None of these have to be huge. The goal is to show consistency, building momentum — your updates should make the reader feel like it’s inevitable that you will build something important.

The Core Sections of a Strong Monthly Investor Update

Once you know what progress looks like, you can plug it into a simple, repeatable structure.

Here’s a format that works well for pre-revenue founders emailing prospective investors:

1. Greeting / Opening
Short, friendly, one–two sentences.

2. Company Blurb (for Prospective Investors)
One italicized paragraph that reminds them what you do and for whom.

3. Optional: TL;DR

4. Sales / Traction / Revenue Updates

5. Product Updates

6. Team Updates

7. Fundraising Updates (if relevant)

8. Goals / Focus for the Next Month

9. Asks

10. Shoutouts & Close

Once you settle on a structure, stick with it. Familiarity makes it easier for investors to skim, find what they care about, and see your progress over time.

This works best when your updates are going to a well-defined, relevant investor list. If you haven’t built one yet, we’ve written a guide on How to Build Your Target Investor List, which walks through how to identify and qualify the right investors before you ever start raising.

How to Use “Asks” Without Being Awkward

Every update should have a small Asks section, even if it’s just one bullet.

Examples:

  • “Warm intros to heads of RevOps at mid-market B2B SaaS companies.”
  • “Connections to founders who have scaled communities from 0 → 10k members.”
  • “Intro to an experienced [role] who has done [specific thing] before.”
  • “Feedback on the linked landing page”

Two things to keep in mind:

1. Expect low response rates.
Realistically, maybe 1–2 out of 100 people will respond to a broad, non-directed ask. That’s not a signal that your updates aren’t working; that’s just how the numbers work when you don’t make a direct ask.
2. Pair the update with targeted follow-ups for much higher response rates.
Use the newsletter to plant the seed, then send direct notes to specific people:
“Hey [Name] – in my latest update I mentioned we’re looking for intros to X. I noticed you’re connected to Y on LinkedIn who seems like a great fit. If you’re open to helping with an intro, I can send you a short, forwardable blurb.”

Shoutouts and Showing Appreciation

When a prospective investor (or operator, or advisor) helps you, thank them in your next update:

“Big thanks to Alex at TSV Capital for a thoughtful product feedback session and a few key intros.”

This signals that:

  • You notice and appreciate help.
  • You follow through on conversations.
  • You’re the kind of founder people feel good investing in.

It also quietly encourages more people to engage—no one hates being publicly appreciated.

Writing Style and Best Practices

A few principles that make investor updates actually work for pre-revenue founders:

1. Be Consistent

  • Pick a day or week each month and commit to sending your update then. Put it on your calendar, and treat it as an unmissable deadline each month.
  • Consistency builds a “pulse” for investors and forces you to regularly reflect on what changed.

2. Treat It Like a Narrative

Each update is a new chapter. If you introduced something in March, continue that thread in April:

  • “Last month, we kicked off user interviews with 10 early adopters. This month, we completed 8 of them and identified three recurring problems we’re now designing around.”

You’re creating a consistent, continuous narrative that builds each month.

3. Avoid Leading With Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are things that sound good but don’t strongly correlate to success:

  • Social followers, newsletter subscribers, or waitlist numbers without context
  • Branding, networking events or conferences that are irrelevant
  • Press mentions that aren’t high-signal (ex. Your local newspaper writing about your startup – probably not worth mentioning. If it’s a relevant outlet, mention it, even if it’s a smaller readership.)

You can still share some of these; just don’t lead with them. Lead with your strongest signals: learning, commitments, product progress, and hires, etc.

4. Be Honest and Transparent

If something slips, gets delayed, or falls apart, own it and share what you’re doing about it:

  • “We’d shared that we expected to launch our beta this month. That slipped to next month because we uncovered a critical UX issue in testing. We’re tightening scope and prioritizing X so we can still get into users’ hands quickly.”

Investors aren’t expecting a smooth path (in fact, they’ll be suspicious if it appears as though you never face obstacles or setbacks). They’re looking for how you respond, how you lead, how you overcome challenges.

5. Use Real Data Wherever You Can

Even pre-revenue, you can use data:

  • “We ran 12 customer interviews this month; 8 of 12 mentioned [pain] unprompted.”
  • “6 orgs have agreed to pilot once V1 ships.”
  • “Our waitlist grew from 23 to 57 signups.”

Tiny numbers are fine. Specific beats vague every time.

6. Set Goals, Then Report Back

One of the simplest ways to build credibility:

  • State a goal in this month’s update.
  • Report back next month.

Example:

  • April: “In May, we’re aiming to complete 10 customer interviews and lock in 3 design partners.”
  • May: “We completed 11 interviews and signed 2 design partners; 1 more is verbally committed and working through legal.”

Just be careful not to over-promise. You don’t want to be the founder who publicly misses their own targets every month. Share goals that are ambitious but you feel confident you can hit.

The Bottom Line

Monthly updates to prospective investors are about creating a cohesive narrative, building trust and credibility. Earning the right to a conversation when you decide to fundraise. They are about building long term relationships. And you do this by showing:

  • You’re learning fast.
  • You’re moving forward, even pre-revenue.
  • You communicate clearly, honestly and consistently.
  • You do what you say you’ll do.

If you treat each update as a small chapter of your story, you will gradually build a strong network of engaged, qualified, investors who will be ready to engage with you when the time comes.

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