Marketing & Growth

How to launch a new product or feature as Small Investor Relations Teams

Marketing & GrowthFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're a two-person IR team preparing a product or fund-strategy announcement and your data is scattered across QuickBooks, NetSuite, Stripe, and a Plaid-connected bank account your CFO refreshes manually every quarter. Writing the LP update email means pulling numbers from four tabs, copying them into a Word doc, handing it to a designer for a slide, and then repeating the whole process when one figure changes the night before send. Your DocSend data room is out of date. Your investor CRM lives in a spreadsheet your CFO also edits. You spend two days on a communication that should take four hours, and you still send a correction email afterward.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Small Investor Relations Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live KPI dashboard that pulls from QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid on a schedule so every number in your launch communication is current without a manual pull

An LP email workflow that drafts announcement copy, stages follow-up sequences for investor questions, and flags replies that need a human response — built on top of your existing Gmail

A commitment and contact tracker that logs which LPs received the announcement, who opened it, who replied, and what they asked — so your two-person team has one source of truth instead of two competing spreadsheets

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 CRM

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks data on a schedule so dashboard numbers refresh without manual exports. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider for the email triage app, which reads threads and drafts replies. The CRM app queries your Gmail and LinkedIn data live when you open a contact record. Any LP portal — DocSend, Intralinks, Juniper Square — that doesn't have a direct integration is automatable through your browser with no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me an investor reporting dashboard that pulls our latest revenue from Stripe, cash balance from Plaid, and operating expenses from QuickBooks, then formats them into a one-page LP update summary I can copy into an email or slide deck. Refresh the numbers every Monday.

Set up an email triage workflow that watches my Gmail for replies to our Q2 product launch announcement, summarizes each LP's question in one sentence, drafts a response using our standard FAQ answers, and flags any email that mentions a capital call, a redemption request, or a legal question for immediate human review.

Build me a CRM that tracks every LP we contacted about this launch — name, fund size, last communication date, whether they replied, and any follow-up action — and lets me add notes from Gmail threads automatically.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks, Stripe, and Plaid in Starch — each syncs on a schedule so your revenue, cash, and expense numbers are current before you write a single word of the announcement.

2 Open the Investor Reporting starter app and tell Starch what you want: 'Show me MRR, net cash position, burn rate, and a 6-month revenue trend, formatted for an LP audience.' Starch builds the dashboard from your live data.

3 Describe the LP update email you need to send: 'Draft an announcement email for our Q2 product launch, pulling in our latest ARR from Stripe and current runway from Plaid, in a tone appropriate for institutional LPs.' Starch drafts it with actual numbers already filled in.

4 Use the Email Triage app connected to Gmail to stage the send and set up a follow-up rule: 'If an LP hasn't replied within 5 business days, send a one-line check-in from me asking if they have questions.'

5 Build a CRM view for this launch: 'Create a tracker with every LP we're emailing, their last interaction date, reply status, and a notes field. Pull contact details from Gmail threads automatically.' This becomes your single source of truth for the campaign.

6 For any LP portal updates — uploading the new product one-pager to DocSend, updating an Intralinks data room, or posting to a Juniper Square LP portal — Starch automates the upload through your browser, no API integration required.

7 After the announcement goes out, ask Starch to monitor replies: 'Summarize every LP reply I receive over the next two weeks, categorize by question type (product question, financial question, legal/compliance question), and draft a response to each one based on our FAQ document in Notion.'

8 Starch syncs your Notion knowledge base so the email drafts actually reflect your current FAQ language, not a hallucinated answer. You review and send — the drafting work is already done.

9 Track engagement by having Starch log every reply, open, and follow-up into your CRM: 'Update my LP tracker every evening with any new replies from Gmail and note what each LP asked about.'

10 One week after the launch, generate a summary report: 'Show me how many LPs we contacted, what percentage replied, the most common questions, and which LPs still haven't responded — format it as a one-page brief I can share with our GP in the Monday standup.'

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Strategy Update — 14-LP Campaign, April close

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR at send date (from Stripe)	412,000
Net cash position (from Plaid)	3,100,000
Burn rate (from QuickBooks operating expenses)	285,000
Runway (months, calculated)	11
LPs contacted	14
LP replies received within 5 days	9
Follow-up emails auto-drafted by Starch	7

The IR team needed to announce a new product line expansion to 14 LPs before the April board meeting. In prior quarters, this took two days: export Stripe MRR manually, pull Plaid cash balance, reconcile burn in QuickBooks, write a draft, hand to a designer for a one-pager, send, then track replies in a shared spreadsheet. This time, the Investor Reporting dashboard already had the numbers — $412K MRR, $3.1M cash, $285K monthly burn, 11 months of runway — because Starch had synced Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks overnight. The draft email took 20 minutes: the team typed 'write a two-paragraph LP update announcing our enterprise product expansion, using our current MRR and runway figures, for an audience of institutional fund LPs' and Starch produced a draft with the live numbers already in it. The Email Triage app sent the staged sequence and, over the following week, Starch summarized all 9 replies, drafted responses to the 7 that asked product or financial questions, and flagged 2 that mentioned side-letter language for human review. The LP tracker updated each evening. The team spent roughly 4 hours total on a campaign that previously consumed two full days.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

LP reply rate within 5 business days of announcement send

Time from data pull to announcement email sent (target: same day)

Number of LP questions answered with a first response within 24 hours

Data room access requests fulfilled within 1 business day

LP tracker completeness — percentage of contacted LPs with a logged reply status and follow-up note

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for LP reporting and fund administration but costs $50K+ per year, assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst, and won't let you build custom surfaces on top of your data without professional services.

Manual QuickBooks exports + Google Slides

Free and familiar but every number in your LP communication is stale by the time you send it, and one updated figure means redoing the deck manually.

Mailchimp or HubSpot for LP communications

Good for bulk email sends but doesn't connect to your financial data, so your team still manually pastes every KPI into the template before each send.

Notion + a shared Google Sheet for LP tracking

Flexible and cheap but two people editing the same sheet means version conflicts, and there's no automatic sync from Gmail threads to your contact records.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — investor reporting, founder inbox, crm 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 connect to LP portals like DocSend, Intralinks, or Juniper Square directly?

Not via a direct API integration today. But Starch automates those portals through your browser — no API needed. You can tell Starch to log into DocSend, upload your updated product one-pager, and set the correct permissions, and it will do it the way a human would. Same for Intralinks or any other web-based data room.

Can Starch actually pull live financial numbers into an LP email draft, or do I still have to copy them in manually?

Starch syncs your Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks data on a schedule. When you ask it to draft an LP update, it reads those synced numbers and writes them into the draft. You're not copying from a spreadsheet — the numbers are already there when the draft appears. You review and adjust, but the manual pull is gone.

We're not SOC 2 certified as a fund — does Starch have a SOC 2 certification we can point LPs to?

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LPs require a SOC 2 report from every vendor that touches fund data, that's a real constraint worth discussing before you connect financial accounts. It's on the roadmap.

Our CFO thinks they own the investor CRM. Can two people edit the same tracker without stepping on each other?

Yes. The CRM you build in Starch is a shared surface — your CFO can view and add notes, you can log email activity, and Starch automatically pulls in Gmail thread data so neither of you is manually updating contact records after every LP call. It won't solve the 'who owns this' politics, but it does eliminate the duplicate-spreadsheet problem.

QuickBooks is our system of record for operating expenses. How current is that data when I'm drafting an LP communication?

Starch syncs QuickBooks on a schedule — entities like invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries come through cleanly. One current limitation: the QuickBooks report views (P&L summary, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable while an upstream connector issue is being fixed. Entity-level data syncs normally, so your burn rate and expense breakdown are live; you just won't see a formatted P&L report pulled directly until that's resolved. The workaround is to have Starch calculate the summary from the underlying transactions.

Can Starch send LP emails directly from my work address, or does it just draft them for me to send?

Both. Starch connects to Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider and can send emails on your behalf — not just draft them. You can set up rules like 'send the follow-up automatically if the LP hasn't replied in 5 days' or 'draft and wait for my approval before sending anything that mentions capital calls.' You control how much of the send is automated versus reviewed.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does that work?

Yes. Starch syncs NetSuite data — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements — on a schedule, the same way it handles QuickBooks. If your IR reporting pulls from NetSuite as the source of record, you connect NetSuite instead of (or alongside) QuickBooks and the rest of the workflow is identical.