Mailing lists can be a simple, yet powerful tool to set cadence and keep people up to date on your progress. The advantage of having several mailing lists is that you can share the right kind of information with the right group, and choose the right cadence for each update.
1. List for Mentors
Mentors, or advisors, are a handful of people who are close to the founders, but aren’t involved in your business day to day. Use this list to deeply engage mentors, and to help them help you.
The mentors list is particularly handy when you are going through a mentorship-driven accelerator like Techstars. Since most accelerator programs are 3 months, and you are trying to get a lot done, a weekly cadence for these emails will ensure that you can get the most out of the mentors. After you are done with the accelerator, sending an update once a month is sufficient.
The key thing in the mentor update is to ask for help.
Explain what you are struggling with, and put down specific requests for how people can help you. In order to get a better response, use @mentorname through the email, so that requests aren’t generic, but addressed to specific mentors.
Consider including the following in your mentor updates: shout outs—thank specific mentors for their help; provide updates on KPIs and milestones; provide a short bullet list of non-quantitative wins, a short list for struggles and requests, and a set of your upcoming goals.
2. List for Your Team
When you are starting the company, and it is just a few co-founders, it seems like everyone knows everything that’s going on. It is, however, a good practice for the CEO to send regular updates to the team, even if you are just two people.
Early-stage startups should be setting goals and making progress every week.
Having a weekly update email, along with the weekly meeting, and weekly goals will help your team get aligned and execute.
Once your company grows and scales, you can switch the cadence of these emails to monthly and even quarterly.
The content of the email should be similar to the mentors email. Include shout-outs and thanks to employees who did a great job, summarize KPIs and wins, explain struggles, ask for help, and set new goals.
3. Lists for Investors – Current and Prospective
Use one mailing list to keep your current investors up to date. This is absolutely critical, and we’ve previously written a separate post explaining why this is so important.
In addition, you should have a separate list for a group of investors who said they wanted to be updated on your progress. This is particularly important for raising series A and beyond, and is also handy in slower funding environments, even for the seed rounds.
Mark Suster, in his classic post, explains it best:
Investors want to invest in lines, not dots.
That is, they want to get to know you, want to see your progress over time, and want to get more conviction that you can execute.
A great way to prove yourself to investors is to show them how you execute over time. If the investor asks you to keep them posted, ask if they want to be on your updates list.
Since these folks are prospective investors, name the list something simple, like updates@company. Send the updates every 4-8 weeks, but no more . For a later-stage company, consider sending them quarterly. Don’t email any of these prospective investors separately, communicate with them exclusively through this list—it helps create FOMO.
The focus of the updates to prospective investors is your progress against your KPIs and milestones.
You are showing that you can set the goals and, hopefully, achieve them. It is also important to be candid about your struggles. You aren’t necessarily asking for help, but you are not just delivering the good news.
Expect that prospective investors will reach back out with questions. If you are hitting it out of the park, and your revenue and customer numbers keep growing, expect that investors will want to meet again, and potentially propose to invest.
We’ve seen this simple system of engaging potential investors via mailing list work well. Remember that like any list, there is a social pressure created. An investor knows that there are other investors on the same list who are getting the updates, and feels compelled to act.
4. More Lists to Help you Communicate
The four lists we talked about above – mentors, team, investors, and prospective investors, are the basic lists that all startups should set up.
In addition, you can, of course, use lists for other communication. For example, you can use news@mailinglist to update friends of the company—anyone who is not a mentor or investor but you want to keep updated.
Once you have a formal board of directors, which I highly recommend you set up after you raise a seed round, create a separate mailing list for the board. Your investors list is a broader list that will include all investors, but your board list will be just the board members. This is part of effective board management that was covered in this post.
It is also a good practice to set up a list for your customers. This list will help you communicate major updates, share industry trends, and discuss upcoming product features.
5. Basic List Maintenance
Lists can be a very effective way to help you manage communication with your team, mentors, investors, etc. Be sure to clean up your lists and keep them up to date.
Be clear, and be careful who you are sending information to and why.
Keep your updates cleanly formatted and short. People don’t have time to read lengthy updates. Lead with essentials.
Be direct, ask for help, and engage and build advantage for your startup through simple mailing lists.
