Investor Relations

How to build a board meeting deck as DTC Brand Founders

Investor RelationsFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You promised your board a quarterly deck. It's the night before and you're copy-pasting Shopify revenue screenshots into Google Slides, manually typing in your Meta Ads spend, and trying to remember whether that Plaid export you downloaded last week is still current. Your CFO (which is also you) closed the month three weeks ago but the numbers still live in four different tabs. You spend more time formatting than thinking. By the time the deck is done, you're too tired to write a honest narrative about what's actually working — so you lead with vanity metrics and hope nobody asks hard questions about CAC payback or inventory turns.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Investor RelationsFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live board deck that pulls your actual Shopify revenue, Plaid bank transactions, and ad spend into one place — no manual exports, no copy-paste

A narrative summary written in your voice: burn rate, net revenue trend, CAC vs. LTV, top wins, and the one risk you actually want to flag

A repeatable process so next quarter's deck takes 30 minutes instead of a Sunday night

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

Investor Reporting Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank feed and Stripe transactions on a schedule — balances, categorized expenses, and revenue data update automatically so your deck always reflects current numbers. Connect Meta Ads and Shopify from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your board app runs to pull ad spend and order data. Klaviyo can be connected from Starch's integration catalog for email revenue attribution if you want to show owned-channel contribution.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly board update for a DTC brand. Pull net revenue and transaction volume from Plaid, burn rate and runway from Stripe, and calculate CAC from Meta Ads spend divided by new customers this quarter. Include a 6-month revenue trend chart, a slide on top-performing SKUs by revenue contribution, a burn and runway slide showing months of cash remaining, and a risks-and-priorities section where I can add 3 bullets manually. Tone should match our last investor update — direct, no fluff.

Show me my current runway using Stripe revenue and Plaid bank feed expenses. Break out COGS, ad spend, and fulfillment as separate expense categories. Project forward 18 months at current burn, and flag the month where cash drops below 3 months of operating expenses.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid in Starch — Starch syncs your bank transactions on a schedule, categorizing expenses into ad spend, fulfillment, returns, and overhead automatically.

2 Connect Stripe so Starch syncs your revenue, refunds, and payout data on a schedule — this becomes the backbone of your P&L slide and runway projection.

3 Connect Shopify and Meta Ads from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query live order volume, SKU-level revenue, and ad spend when your board app runs.

4 Open the Investor Reporting starter app and tell Starch which quarter you're closing — it pulls the synced data and drafts a first-pass narrative covering net revenue, burn rate, and runway.

5 Open the Runway Analysis app and confirm your expense category mapping — make sure fulfillment costs aren't bucketed under 'software' and that your ad spend is broken out from COGS.

6 Type your specific prompt describing the board deck you want: number of slides, which metrics to feature, which risks to flag, and the tone you want Starch to match.

7 Review the first draft — the narrative summary, the burn slide, and the revenue trend chart. Edit the risks-and-priorities section manually with anything the data doesn't capture (a supplier issue, a market shift, a team change).

8 Check the CAC calculation — tell Starch your new customer count from Shopify this quarter and it divides your Meta Ads spend to get blended CAC. Flag if the number looks off before the board sees it.

9 Add a SKU-level slide by prompting Starch: 'Show top 5 SKUs by net revenue this quarter, excluding returns, and flag any SKU where return rate exceeded 12%.'

10 Export to PowerPoint or PDF, or share a live link directly with board members — no reformatting, no designer needed.

11 Save the prompt and configuration as a reusable template in Starch so next quarter you run the same workflow in one click, update the manual bullets, and you're done.

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 — March 31 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Net revenue (Stripe)	412,000
Ad spend — Meta Ads	98,000
Fulfillment & 3PL (Plaid)	61,000
Returns & chargebacks (Stripe)	22,000
Operating overhead (Plaid)	44,000
Net burn (Q1)	87,000
Cash on hand (Plaid balance)	1,040,000

Starch pulls the March 31 Plaid snapshot showing $1.04M cash on hand and $87K net burn for Q1. Stripe syncs $412K net revenue after $22K in refunds — up 18% quarter over quarter. Meta Ads spend from the integration catalog comes in at $98K, and with Shopify reporting 1,240 new customers acquired, blended CAC lands at $79. The board slide shows CAC trending up from $64 in Q4 — that's the number worth a conversation, and Starch flags it in the narrative automatically because the quarter-over-quarter delta exceeds 15%. Runway at current burn is 11.9 months, projected to extend to 14.2 months if Q2 revenue hits the $460K forecast. The fulfillment line at $61K is the largest non-ad expense category; Starch breaks it out separately so the board can see you're not hiding it in COGS. The whole deck — six slides, charts included — was drafted in about 25 minutes. The founder spent the remaining time writing two honest bullets about what's actually broken rather than reformatting a spreadsheet.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Blended CAC (Meta Ads spend ÷ new Shopify customers, by quarter)

Net revenue after returns (Stripe net of chargebacks and refunds)

Months of runway at current burn rate (Plaid cash ÷ monthly net burn)

Return rate by SKU (orders with refunds ÷ total orders, flagged when >12%)

Ad spend as a percentage of net revenue (efficiency floor for the board)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Slides + manual exports

Total control over design but every number has to be manually copied from Shopify, Stripe, and your ad platforms — takes 4-6 hours per quarter and breaks the moment any source updates after you've exported.

Notion board update template

Good for writing the narrative but has no live data connections — you still need to manually pull and paste every metric, so it saves time on formatting but not on the actual work.

Looker Studio (Google Data Studio)

Handles charts and live Shopify/Ads data reasonably well, but building a board-ready slide deck from it requires exporting to Slides anyway, and there's no narrative-drafting capability — you get numbers without words.

Runway.com or Mosaic

Strong financial modeling tools built for CFOs, but they're priced for funded companies with a finance function and don't generate the actual slide deck — they're inputs to a deck, not the deck itself.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, runway analysis 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

Does Starch actually connect to Shopify and Meta Ads, or do I have to export CSVs?

No CSV exports. Connect Shopify and Meta Ads from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live each time your board app runs. Plaid and Stripe sync on a schedule in the background, so your bank balance and revenue numbers are always current without any manual step.

My numbers are messy — returns are mixed into revenue, fulfillment costs are miscategorized. Will Starch handle that or just surface the wrong data?

Starch will surface whatever your sources contain, so if Stripe is showing gross revenue before refunds, you'll want to tell it explicitly: 'Use net revenue after chargebacks and refunds.' The agent can be prompted to apply specific calculation logic. If your Plaid expense categorization is off, you can tell Starch which categories to remap — it doesn't just accept the default labels.

Is this SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting bank data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. That's an honest limit worth knowing before you connect Plaid. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for your board or investors, we'd tell you to wait. It's on the roadmap.

What if I want to add a slide about something the data doesn't cover — like a supplier risk or a team update?

You write it yourself and Starch puts it in the right place. The workflow is: Starch drafts the data-driven slides, you add manual bullets or a freeform slide for context that isn't in any system. The deck isn't fully automated — it's a 90-minute job that becomes a 30-minute job.

Will the deck look professional enough to actually send to my board, or will I need a designer to clean it up?

The Investor Reporting app produces a formatted output with charts and narrative. For a polished slide deck with custom layouts, the Presentation Agent — currently in development, request beta access — will build a full PowerPoint or PDF from your description. Until that launches, the Investor Reporting output is designed to be board-ready without a designer, though you can export and apply your own brand formatting in Slides or PowerPoint if you want to match a specific visual identity.

Can Starch pull in Klaviyo email revenue so I can show owned-channel contribution separate from paid?

Yes — connect Klaviyo from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your board app runs. You can prompt it to break out email-attributed revenue as a separate line from Shopify total revenue, so the board can see what percentage of sales you're driving without Meta.

I close my books late — my bookkeeper doesn't finalize QuickBooks until the 20th of the following month. What happens to the board deck before that?

Starch syncs Stripe and Plaid directly, so your bank transactions and payment processor data are available immediately after month-end regardless of when QuickBooks closes. The board deck can run on Stripe + Plaid data without waiting for the bookkeeper. If you want QuickBooks entity-level data (invoices, bills, vendor payments) to appear too, Starch syncs those normally — note that QuickBooks report views like P&L summary are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue, but the underlying transaction data syncs fine.