Internal Comms & Meetings

How to prepare an all-hands deck as DTC Brand Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor DTC Brand Founders4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every quarter you rebuild the all-hands from scratch. You pull last month's Shopify revenue into a spreadsheet, manually grab Meta ROAS from Ads Manager, screenshot a Klaviyo open-rate chart, and then sit in Google Slides trying to make it all look intentional. By the time you're done it's 1am, half the numbers are from the wrong date range, and your team is getting a deck that already feels stale. You have no designer, no chief of staff, and no EA. The data exists — it's just in five different tabs that don't talk to each other. You end up spending more time formatting than thinking.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor DTC Brand Founders4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An all-hands deck that pulls live data from your actual business — Shopify orders, ad spend, bank balances — instead of numbers you copied by hand at midnight

A structured meeting workflow where action items get captured automatically and land in a searchable archive your team can reference after the call

A repeatable quarterly rhythm: same format, same data sources, same on-brand design — so next quarter takes 20 minutes instead of 4 hours

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

Presentation Agent Investor Reporting Meeting Notes Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Stripe and Plaid (both scheduled-sync providers) so revenue, burn, and transaction data refresh automatically before each all-hands. Shopify is connected from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the deck is being built. Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads are also reachable from the integration catalog for live ad spend data. Slack is available as a scheduled-sync provider if you want to push the deck link and action item summary to your team channel automatically after the meeting.

Prompts to copy

Build a 12-slide all-hands deck for our DTC brand's Q2 review. Include: revenue vs. goal (pull from Stripe and Plaid), CAC trend over 90 days (I'll paste in Meta and Google Ads spend), top-selling SKUs last quarter (from Shopify), refund rate, and three priorities for next quarter. Keep the tone direct — we're a 14-person team, not a Fortune 500.

Draft a one-page narrative summary of our Q2 performance to include in the all-hands deck. Use the same burn rate and runway numbers from our last investor update, flag that CAC is up 18% vs Q1, and note that the new bundle SKU hit $140K in its first 6 weeks.

Transcribe today's all-hands meeting and extract every action item. Assign each one to the person named in the conversation. Archive the summary in our team knowledge base under 'All-Hands / Q2 2026'.

Save the Q2 all-hands deck, meeting summary, and action items as a single searchable record in our company wiki so the team can find decisions and context later.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid in Starch — both sync on a schedule, so your revenue, burn rate, and bank balance are already current when you sit down to build the deck.

2 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog. The agent will query it live when it pulls top SKUs, order volume, and refund rate for the deck.

3 Connect Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull CAC, ROAS, and spend by channel for the trailing 90 days without you copying numbers by hand.

4 Open the Presentation Agent app and type your brief — slide count, audience (your 14-person team), which metrics to feature, and any context you want the narrative to reflect, like a new product launch or a tough month on returns.

5 Starch builds a draft deck with layouts, data visualizations, and a narrative summary. Review it, iterate on individual slides in natural language ('make the CAC slide show month-over-month instead of quarterly'), and adjust the design to match your brand.

6 If you also need an investor-facing version of the same numbers, open the Investor Reporting app — it pulls from the same Stripe and Plaid data and formats a separate update with burn, runway, MRR growth, and competitive context.

7 Export the all-hands deck to Google Slides or PDF, or share via a direct link. Push the link to your team Slack channel — Starch can automate that step too if you connect Slack.

8 When the all-hands meeting starts, turn on Meeting Notes. It transcribes in real time so you can run the meeting instead of typing, and it captures every decision and commitment made during the call.

9 After the call, Meeting Notes generates a summary with extracted action items tagged to the people named in the conversation. No follow-up email needed — the record exists.

10 Archive the deck, meeting summary, and action items in Knowledge Management under a consistent folder structure ('All-Hands / Q2 2026'). Now when someone asks 'what did we decide about the loyalty program?' in six months, they can search for it instead of asking you.

11 Set a quarterly reminder automation in Starch: 10 days before each all-hands, trigger the Presentation Agent workflow automatically with your standard template so you're not starting from zero every time.

12 Review the action items from the previous all-hands at the top of the next one — Starch pulls them from your knowledge base so you open every meeting with accountability, not a blank slide.

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

Q2 2026 All-Hands — June 30 close

Sample numbers from a real run

Shopify gross revenue (Q2)	1,240,000
Returns and refunds	87,000
Net revenue	1,153,000
Meta Ads spend (Q2)	198,000
Google Ads spend (Q2)	61,000
Blended CAC (Q2)	47
New bundle SKU revenue (first 6 weeks)	140,000
Bank balance (Plaid)	410,000
Monthly burn rate	118,000
Runway (months)	3.5

You type into Presentation Agent: 'Build a 12-slide Q2 all-hands for a DTC skincare brand. Net revenue $1.15M, down 6% vs Q1 target of $1.22M. Blended CAC $47, up from $40 in Q1 — call out that Meta ROAS dropped from 2.4x to 1.9x. New bundle SKU was the bright spot: $140K in its first 6 weeks. Refund rate ticked up to 7.1%, flagging this as a Q3 risk. Bank balance $410K, burn $118K/month, runway 3.5 months — we're actively in a fundraise. Three Q3 priorities: cut CAC back to $42 through creative refresh, hit 90-day reorder rate of 35%, close the bridge by August 15.' Starch builds the deck in under 4 minutes — slides on revenue vs. goal, CAC trend with a month-over-month bar chart, SKU performance table, refund rate callout, and a runway slide. You iterate: 'Move the fundraise slide to position 2, not 11 — the team needs the context up front.' The deck is ready before the meeting starts. During the call, Meeting Notes captures that your head of growth committed to a creative audit by July 14 and your ops lead agreed to audit your 3PL contract by July 7. Both items land in the action item log automatically. The deck, summary, and action items are archived in Knowledge Management under 'All-Hands / Q2 2026.' Next quarter you start with the same template — just update the numbers.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Blended CAC by channel (Meta, Google, organic) — are you paying more per customer than last quarter?

Net revenue vs. goal — Shopify gross minus refunds, tracked monthly

Runway in months — bank balance divided by trailing 90-day average burn

Top-SKU contribution — what percentage of revenue is coming from your top 3 products

Action item completion rate from previous all-hands — did the team actually do what they said they'd do

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 rebuilding the deck from scratch every quarter — copying numbers by hand across five tabs with no live data connection and no guarantee the numbers match.

Beautiful.ai or Canva

Better design templates than Google Slides, but still no data integrations — you're formatting manually, not building from your actual Shopify, Stripe, and Plaid numbers.

Notion for meeting notes + wiki

Starch syncs directly to Notion as a scheduled-sync provider if you want to keep using it, but Notion alone won't transcribe your all-hands, extract action items, or build the deck — you'd still need separate tools for each piece.

Loom + a shared Google Doc

Good for async communication, but Loom recordings aren't searchable for decisions, and a shared doc doesn't auto-extract action items or connect to your business data.

A fractional COO or EA

A real person handles nuance better than any tool, but at your stage you're probably not paying $8K/month for someone to prep a quarterly deck — Starch handles the repeatable structure so the human time you do have goes to judgment calls.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, investor reporting, meeting notes 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, or do I have to export a CSV?

No CSV needed. Shopify is available from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your app or deck is being built. You connect it once and it's available for every workflow you run.

The Presentation Agent is listed as 'currently in development' — can I use it today?

Presentation Agent is in development; you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Investor Reporting app is live and can generate a structured narrative summary with charts and financials that you can import into your slides manually — it's not zero-effort, but it gets you most of the way there on the data side.

My Meta Ads data doesn't automatically sync — will the CAC numbers in the deck be stale?

Meta Ads Manager is available from Starch's integration catalog, so the agent queries it live when it's building your deck — it's pulling current data at the moment you run the workflow, not a cached snapshot from last week. That said, live-queried apps aren't stored in Starch's database, so if you want historical CAC trend data going back 12 months you'd want to make sure you're querying with the right date range in your prompt.

What if I want the all-hands deck to include inventory forecast or reorder projections?

If your inventory data lives in a tool that's in Starch's integration catalog — like a spreadsheet in Google Sheets, or an order management system — the agent can query it live. If your reorder math lives in a Google Sheet, connect it from the catalog and describe what you want: 'Pull current inventory levels from our reorder tracking sheet and add a slide showing which SKUs are within 30 days of stockout at current sell-through rate.' Starch builds the logic from the description.

Is my financial data — bank balances, Stripe revenue — stored in Starch?

Plaid and Stripe are scheduled-sync providers, which means Starch syncs that data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database so your apps and dashboards can query it instantly. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, so if that's a hard requirement for your business, that's worth knowing upfront.

Can meeting notes from the all-hands actually get pushed back into my team's Slack channel automatically?

Yes. Slack is a scheduled-sync provider in Starch, so you can build an automation that takes the Meeting Notes summary and action items after the call ends and posts them to the right channel. Describe it to Starch: 'After each all-hands meeting ends, take the summary and action item list and post them to #all-hands-updates in Slack.' Starch sets up the automation.

We run the all-hands quarterly. Is there a way to not start from zero every time?

That's exactly what the Knowledge Management app is for. Archive each deck, meeting summary, and action item list in a consistent folder structure. When it's time to build the next quarter's deck, you can reference previous decisions, pull last quarter's format as a starting point, and brief Starch with what changed — rather than reconstructing context from scratch.