Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as Solo Media and Creator Founders

Investor RelationsFor Solo Media and Creator Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You raised a small friends-and-family round or took on an angel investor to fund your first hire or a content push, and now you owe them a quarterly board update. Your 'board deck' is currently a Google Slides file you last touched six months ago, manually copy-pasted MRR from your Stripe dashboard, typed in subscriber counts from Beehiiv, and guessed at runway using a spreadsheet your accountant built. Pulling the numbers alone takes half a day because they live in Stripe, Plaid, your Google Sheet sponsor tracker, and YouTube Studio. You don't have a CFO. You don't have a designer. You have a Sunday night and a deadline.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor Solo Media and Creator Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live Runway Analysis dashboard that pulls Stripe revenue and Plaid bank transactions on a schedule so your burn rate and cash projection are always current — not a number you calculated once in March

A board-ready presentation built by Starch's Presentation Agent from a text description, with your actual MRR, runway, and subscriber growth pre-populated, exportable to PDF or a shareable link

An Investor Reporting workflow that drafts your narrative update — wins, risks, what you need from investors — by pulling live financial data and letting you fill in the story context, then sends it on whatever cadence you set

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Runway Analysis Investor Reporting Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule (charges, subscriptions, MRR) and syncs your Plaid bank transactions on a schedule (categorized expenses, balances). Beehiiv subscriber counts are pulled live when your app runs by connecting Beehiiv from Starch's integration catalog. YouTube Studio metrics are reachable through browser automation — no YouTube Data API setup needed. Your Google Sheet sponsor tracker connects from Starch's integration catalog and is queried live. Notion editorial calendar connects from Starch's integration catalog.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Stripe account and my Plaid bank feed. Show me net burn for the last 6 months, my current runway in months, and a 24-month cash projection. Break expenses into categories: contractor payments, software subscriptions, ad spend, and miscellaneous.

Pull this quarter's Stripe MRR, Plaid net burn, and runway number from my Runway Analysis app. Add my current paid subscriber count from Beehiiv and my YouTube subscriber count. Draft a board update email with sections for: financial highlights, growth metrics, top 3 wins this quarter, top 2 risks, and what I'm asking investors for. Match the tone of my last update.

Build a 10-slide quarterly board deck for a solo media company. Slide 1: title and date. Slide 2: business snapshot — newsletter subscribers, podcast downloads, YouTube subscribers. Slide 3: revenue breakdown — subscription revenue vs sponsorship revenue. Slide 4: MRR growth chart, last 6 months. Slide 5: burn rate and runway. Slide 6: top sponsor wins this quarter. Slide 7: content performance highlights. Slide 8: risks and what I'm watching. Slide 9: ask — what I need from the board. Slide 10: appendix with raw numbers.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe from the Starch scheduled-sync setup — Starch will sync your charges, subscriptions, and payout data on a daily schedule. This is the MRR and revenue side of your deck.

2 Connect your business bank account through Plaid in Starch's scheduled-sync setup — Starch pulls categorized transactions and balances daily, which is where your burn rate comes from.

3 Open the Runway Analysis starter app from the Starch App Store. Fork it and tell Starch: 'Break my expenses into four buckets: contractor payments, software subscriptions, ad spend, and everything else.' This gives you the clean burn-by-category view your investors want.

4 Connect Beehiiv from Starch's integration catalog so your subscriber count is available live when your board app runs. If you're on Substack or Buttondown, Starch automates those through your browser — no API needed.

5 Connect your Google Sheet sponsor tracker from Starch's integration catalog. Tell Starch: 'Pull my current active sponsors, deal values, and renewal dates into my board app so I can see sponsor revenue alongside subscription revenue.'

6 Open the Investor Reporting starter app. In the setup prompt, describe your business: 'I run a newsletter with X paid subscribers and a podcast with Y monthly downloads. My revenue is split between paid subscriptions via Stripe and sponsorships tracked in a Google Sheet. Draft a quarterly board update with financial highlights, growth metrics, wins, risks, and my ask.'

7 Before each board meeting, open Investor Reporting and fill in the context fields: what actually happened this quarter, any one-time expenses that skew the burn number, and what you want investors to do (intro to a specific person, feedback on a pricing change, etc.). Starch drafts the narrative around the live financial data.

8 Use the Presentation Agent to turn your Investor Reporting draft into a slide deck. Paste or describe the structure: 'Take this board update draft and make it a 10-slide deck. Slide 3 should be a MRR bar chart for the last 6 months. Slide 5 should show runway as a visual timeline.' Presentation Agent is currently in development — request beta access on the Starch site.

9 Export the deck to PDF or a shareable link directly from Presentation Agent. No reformatting in Google Slides, no asking a freelance designer to clean it up at midnight.

10 Set Investor Reporting to send the narrative update email to your investor list on a schedule — monthly or quarterly — so you're not manually triggering it and forgetting.

11 After your board call, update any commitments you made by telling Starch: 'Add a section to next quarter's update template called Follow-up on commitments and remind me to fill it in two weeks before the next board date.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 Board Update — The Backlog Newsletter

Sample numbers from a real run

Stripe subscription MRR	8,400
Sponsorship revenue (Q1, 2 sponsors × 6 issues)	14,000
Total Q1 revenue	22,400
Contractor spend (editor + audio editor)	6,200
Software subscriptions (Beehiiv, Riverside, Descript, etc.)	890
Ad spend (paid acquisition test)	2,100
Net burn (expenses minus revenue)	-13,210
Cash in bank (Plaid balance)	87,500
Runway at current pace	6

The Backlog is a 4,200-paid-subscriber B2B tech newsletter with a companion podcast hitting 11,000 downloads per episode. Going into the Q1 board update, the founder pulled Stripe MRR ($8,400, up 12% from Q4) and Plaid expenses ($9,190 in contractor and software costs, plus a $2,100 paid acquisition test) into the Runway Analysis app. Net burn for the quarter was $9,190 against $22,400 in total revenue — the business is technically profitable, but the acquisition test made March look ugly in isolation, which would have been confusing without the category breakdown. Starch's Investor Reporting draft flagged the March spike, explained it in the narrative as a one-time test, and showed the underlying subscription trend cleanly. The sponsor tracker in Google Sheets showed two renewed sponsors (valued at $7,000/issue each for 6 issues) and one new pitch in late-stage conversation. The board deck Presentation Agent built led with the subscriber and download growth chart, put runway on slide 5 with a 6-month timeline visual, and had the sponsor pipeline on slide 6. Total time from 'open Starch' to 'send deck to investors': 90 minutes, including the founder's own edits to the wins and risks narrative.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Paid subscriber count and month-over-month growth rate (not total list size — paid only)

Sponsorship revenue per issue and forward-booked sponsor revenue for the next 90 days

Net burn and runway in months, updated from Plaid transactions and Stripe payouts

Revenue mix: subscription percentage vs sponsorship percentage (diversification matters to investors in creator businesses)

Cost per new paid subscriber from any acquisition spend vs organic growth rate

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Slides + manual data pull

Free and familiar, but you're spending 4-6 hours every quarter copying numbers from Stripe, Beehiiv, and your bank into slides — and the numbers are already stale by the time you hit send.

Notion board update template

Good for writing the narrative, but Notion doesn't pull your Stripe MRR or Plaid burn automatically — you're still manually entering the numbers that matter most to investors.

Visible.vc

Purpose-built for investor updates and looks polished, but it doesn't connect to Beehiiv, your sponsor Google Sheet, or Plaid — so creator-specific metrics like subscriber growth and sponsorship pipeline still require manual entry.

Fathom or ChartMogul

Strong for Stripe-based subscription analytics and MRR charts, but covers only the revenue side — no expense tracking, no narrative drafting, no slide output, and no connection to your content platform metrics.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, investor reporting, presentation agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My business is tiny — one angel investor and a $50K check. Do I actually need a board deck?

You don't need a 40-slide enterprise deck, but a short quarterly update keeps your investor warm, makes you look organized, and gives you a forcing function to actually review your numbers. The Starch version is 10 slides and takes 90 minutes because the data pull is automated. That's worth doing even for a single check.

I'm on Substack, not Beehiiv. Can Starch pull my subscriber numbers?

Substack doesn't have a public API, but Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You log in once, and Starch can pull subscriber counts and revenue figures from your Substack dashboard as part of your board update workflow.

My revenue is mostly sponsorships invoiced outside Stripe — just bank deposits. Can Starch track that?

Yes. Starch syncs your Plaid bank transactions on a schedule, so cash deposits show up in your balance and transaction history. You can also connect your Google Sheet sponsor tracker from Starch's integration catalog so invoiced-but-not-yet-paid sponsorship pipeline is visible alongside actual deposits. The combination gives investors a cleaner picture than Stripe alone.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting my bank account.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If that's a hard requirement for your setup, that's worth knowing upfront. Plaid is the intermediary for bank connections and is bank-grade secure on their side; the gap is Starch's own certification status.

The Presentation Agent sounds great. Is it available now?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access on the Starch site to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, Investor Reporting generates the narrative update and data export you can drop into Google Slides manually — still faster than building from scratch.

QuickBooks is where my bookkeeper closes the books. Can I use that instead of Plaid for expenses?

Yes. Starch syncs QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. One note: QuickBooks report views like P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled while an upstream connector issue gets fixed, but entity-level data syncs normally. For a board deck showing expense categories, entity-level data is usually enough.

What if my numbers change between when I draft the update and when I send it?

Starch syncs Stripe and Plaid on a daily schedule, so the numbers in your Investor Reporting draft reflect the most recent sync when you open it. If you want to update the draft right before sending, just re-run the data pull and Starch regenerates the financial sections with the latest figures.