Investor Relations

How to send a monthly investor update as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Investor RelationsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Every month, you spend two to three days assembling the investor update that the CEO will spend twenty minutes reviewing before sending. You pull burn from a Plaid export, MRR from Stripe, bookings pipeline from HubSpot, headcount from a QuickBooks payroll line, and qualitative wins from a Notion doc the functional leads half-filled in. Then you reconcile the numbers because they never match across tools, write a narrative that sounds like the CEO (not you), format it into a template, and send it to a list that lives in a Google Sheet someone made in 2023. The whole thing is manual, brittle, and the first thing that slips when Q3 planning or a board prep collision lands in the same week.

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Investor RelationsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live financial data layer — Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks syncing on a schedule — so your burn, MRR, and runway numbers are always current before you even open the draft

An Investor Reporting app that pulls this month's metrics automatically, drafts the narrative update in the CEO's voice, and emails it to your investor list on a fixed cadence

A Runway Analysis dashboard you can link inside the update so investors (and the CEO) can see the live projection without asking you to re-pull it

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 Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks data on a schedule — charges, subscriptions, bank transactions, and expense entities update automatically and live in Starch's database. HubSpot is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the app needs pipeline data. The investor distribution list can live in a Google Sheet connected from Starch's integration catalog, or Gmail handles delivery directly via Starch's scheduled-sync Gmail connection.

Prompts to copy

Build me a monthly investor update that pulls MRR and net new ARR from Stripe, burn rate and cash balance from Plaid, and headcount cost from QuickBooks. Draft a narrative section for wins, risks, and asks. Keep the tone direct and match the style of the last update I paste in. Email the final draft to me for review before it sends to the investor list.

Build me a runway dashboard showing real net burn using the last 6 months of Plaid transactions and Stripe revenue. Show 24-month forward projections and break expenses down by category. I want to be able to link this directly inside the monthly investor update.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe, Plaid, and QuickBooks as scheduled-sync providers in Starch. These sync on a schedule so your MRR, burn, cash balance, and expense line items are always current — you do this once.

2 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live when it needs bookings pipeline, deal count, or stage data for the update narrative.

3 Start with the Investor Reporting app from the App Store. It's a working starting point — you'll customize it to match your update format, your investor list, and the sections your board actually cares about.

4 Paste in your last two investor updates and tell Starch: 'Match this tone and structure. The CEO writes in first person, leads with the headline number, and never uses bullet points in the narrative.' Starch calibrates the draft style to what you've already established.

5 Configure the monthly trigger: 'Send me a review draft on the 3rd of each month, with the final version going to the investor list on the 5th unless I make changes.' The automation handles the cadence from here.

6 Set up the Runway Analysis app and link its live dashboard URL inside the investor update template. Investors who want to dig into the numbers can click through; the CEO's email stays clean.

7 Add a 'functional leads input' step: tell Starch to pull the last week of Notion updates from your ops and product pages and summarize the top wins and blockers per function. This replaces the email you normally send asking four people to fill in a doc.

8 Add a prompt for the risks and asks section: 'Each month, pull any open fundraising conversations from HubSpot, flag any categories where burn has increased more than 15% month-over-month from Plaid, and surface those as candidate risks.' Starch surfaces them; you decide what goes in.

9 Review the draft Starch sends you. Your job is now editorial — checking the narrative framing and the CEO's sign-off — not data assembly. Most months this is 30 minutes, not three hours.

10 After you approve, Starch sends the update via Gmail on the schedule you set. The investor list, the subject line format, and the reply-to address are all configurable in the app.

11 After the update sends, Starch logs the key metrics (MRR, burn, runway months, headcount) to a Notion database you specify — so you have a month-by-month record without maintaining a separate tracker.

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

March 2026 Monthly Update — 150-person Series B company

Sample numbers from a real run

MRR (from Stripe)	487,000
Net new ARR added in March	94,000
Net burn (Plaid, March actuals)	612,000
Cash on hand (Plaid balance)	8,400,000
Runway at current burn	13.7
Headcount (QuickBooks payroll)	151

On March 3rd, Starch pulls March actuals from Stripe ($487K MRR, up from $441K in February — a $46K MoM increase), Plaid ($612K net burn, up 8% from February due to a one-time vendor payment Starch flags in the risk section), and QuickBooks (151 employees, $1.2M payroll run). The draft arrives in your inbox at 7am. The narrative reads: 'March was our strongest net-new ARR month since October — $94K added, driven by three enterprise closes in the northeast. Burn ticked up 8% due to an annual infrastructure contract renewal; normalized burn is flat to February. Runway sits at 13.7 months at current pace.' You spend 25 minutes adjusting one paragraph about the enterprise pipeline (the CEO wants to name the sector, not the specific prospects), approve it, and it goes to 34 investors at 9am on March 5th. You did not touch a single export, pivot table, or formatting template.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Hours spent per monthly investor update cycle (target: under 1 hour from draft to send)

Update send date vs. committed cadence (are you actually sending on the 5th of each month?)

Data freshness at time of send — are Stripe and Plaid numbers current-month or lagged?

Investor open rate and reply rate on the update email

Variance between Starch-reported burn and bookkeeper-closed books (a proxy for how much manual reconciliation you're still doing)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Manual process: Notion doc + Stripe dashboard + Plaid export + QuickBooks report

Gives you full control over every sentence but takes 2-3 days per cycle and breaks whenever one data source is delayed or a functional lead doesn't fill in their section.

Visible.vc or Briefcase

Purpose-built for investor updates with polished templates, but requires manual data entry or separate integrations for Stripe and Plaid — you're still the glue between your financial data and the narrative.

Notion AI + manual data pull

Good for drafting the narrative if you paste in the numbers, but Notion doesn't connect to Stripe, Plaid, or QuickBooks — you're still assembling the inputs by hand before AI can help.

Google Slides deck sent via Gmail

What most founders do at seed stage; works fine until you have 20+ investors, a board that wants consistent metrics tracked over time, and a chief of staff who has twelve other things due that week.

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

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? Some of our investors are at funds with data security requirements.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your investor data policy requires a certified vendor for sending financial updates, that's worth knowing upfront. Most seed and Series A founders use Starch without issue; if you're at a stage where institutional LPs are auditing your vendor stack, flag it to your counsel.

Our QuickBooks books aren't fully closed for the month until the 10th. Can Starch wait for that before drafting?

Yes. You can set the trigger date to whatever works — tell Starch 'draft the update on the 12th of each month using QuickBooks data as of the 10th.' Starch syncs QuickBooks entities (invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries) on a schedule, so by the 12th the data will reflect whatever your bookkeeper closed. One honest note: QuickBooks P&L report views are temporarily unavailable due to a connector issue, but entity-level data — the invoices, bills, and journal entries that make up your burn — syncs normally.

Can Starch pull HubSpot pipeline data into the update, or just financial metrics?

Yes. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your update runs — deals, stage, close probability, owner. Tell Starch: 'Include a pipeline section showing deals in late stage by rep and estimated close date.' It pulls and summarizes. If you want the CEO to be able to see pipeline without clicking into HubSpot, Starch can build a lightweight pipeline view that lives alongside the Runway Analysis dashboard.

What if the CEO wants to edit the draft before it goes out? I can't have something auto-send without review.

The default flow is draft-then-review, not auto-send. Starch sends you (and whoever else you specify) a review draft first. The final send only happens when you approve it, or on a delayed schedule you set — for example, 'send to investors 48 hours after I receive the draft unless I make changes.' Nothing goes out without a human checkpoint unless you explicitly configure it that way.

We use NetSuite, not QuickBooks. Does this still work?

Yes. Starch syncs NetSuite data on a schedule — invoices, expenses, journal entries, balance sheets, and income statements. The Investor Reporting app is built to work with any of the connected financial sources. Tell Starch which fields to pull from NetSuite and it builds the update logic around those instead of QuickBooks.

Can I use this to track what I've told investors in previous updates, so we're consistent month to month?

Yes — this is actually one of the most useful customizations for a chief of staff role. Tell Starch: 'After each update sends, log the key metrics and the narrative summary to a Notion database tagged by month.' Over time, you build a record of what you said, what the numbers were, and how they've trended. When an investor asks 'you said you'd hit $500K MRR by Q2 — where are you?' you have the receipts and the current answer in one place.