Fundraising via your Investor Newsletter. A Fake Example.

Link to this doc: http://bit.ly/fake-newsletter-template 

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SUBJECT LINE: HippoLove Investor Update - June 2021

EMAIL BODY:

Hey [INVESTOR],

We hope that you are having a great summer. We are pleased to share that our team has been fully vaccinated, and we are now meeting in person on a regular basis! Here’s a picture of us enjoying an afternoon of work at Jack London Square from last week:

Very much look forward to catching up with many of you over coffee in person soon.

All information that follows is confidential, please do not share or forward.

TL;DR.

  • We are now at $1.5M ARR.
  • HippoLove is now pacing 32% month-over-month revenue growth, and have sustained this level of growth now for the past six months.
  • Our team just hired a new CFO, who was previously the VP of Finance at Amazon!
  • We believe we are Series A ready. We are considering a raise starting with our insiders first.

If you’d like to quickly catch up let’s schedule 15 minutes here: [calendly link]

What does HippoLove do?

HippoLove is a platform to help zoos better manage the health and safety of their hippos. Hippo management has traditionally been an arcane industry, managed by paper and pen for decades--we are modernizing this space with cloud management software, machine learning, and data analytics. We are backed by Hustle Fund and other top VCs.

Key Asks.

  • We are hiring 5 infrastructure engineers: [job link]
  • Our CEO is looking for an executive coach. Would love recommendations, please reply.
  • We are running into a payments scale issue with Stripe. Anyone here have contacts at Stripe or expertise to share to assist us? Please reply.

Our goals from May.

  • Hire 2 new front-end engineers. Goal hit.
  • Reach $1.6M ARR. Goal miss by $100K.
  • Complete our NPS survey of existing clients. Goal hit, and more details below.

May highlights.

On talent.

We are pleased to welcome two new front-end engineers to the team!

  • Meet Mary. Previously she was the first engineer at Coinbase, and has build a career as an impressive hacker, starting her career as a middle school student as a contract engineer. Mary is passionate about hippos and eagerly accepted our role.
  • Meet Jane. Jane previously worked as a Goldman Sachs banker before taking a big career risk to re-train as a software developer. After hustling her way into a role at Facebook, she decided to leave for brighter pastures here at HippoLove.

Thank you Mary/Jane for bringing your talents to our land of hungry hippos!

On revenue.

We set an aggressive goal to hit $1.6M in revenue this past month, but we were just barely short. We would have hit the goal but unfortunately the Oakland Zoo was a bit slow in terms of closing. We learned an important lesson that zoo regulation varies a lot by county/district, and there were some regulatory hurdles to overcome to get HippoLove through. We expect to close with the Oakland Zoo before the next monthly update.

Here is a chart of our past six month of revenue growth at HippoLove:

As you can see, we are a bit linear in growth, but expect by H2 to hit a more exponential growth curve with some key sales/customer success hires we are about to make.

On NPS.

We just completed an anonymous NPS survey from our 26 clients, and we are pleased the share the results:

We have an impressive score of 88, which puts us at the very top of customer satisfaction/recommendation among all our peers in the hippo platform industry.

Our team is celebrating the impressive milestone, but we are working hard to improve our technology and client experience to get this to a 100 over time.

Some final stats.

  • Current burn is $100K/month, which gives us 10 months of runway. $1M in the bank.
  • We have 47 candidates in our pipeline for infrastructure engineers, but given the roadmap we have planned, we need to at least double this to triangulate the right candidates.
  • Retention is now at 97%! People love our product!

Thank you!

  • Huge thank you to Elizabeth Yin at Hustle Fund for offering key advice on hippo grazing.
  • Thank you to Natasha at TechCrunch for the awesome coverage of HippoLove last week: [LINK]
  • Final thank you to Jimmy Jingleheimer for spending several hours this month with us to analyze our cohort analysis.

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It’s been a wonderful month, thank you all for being a part of this journey! If you’d like to catch up, please schedule 15 minutes with me here: [Calendly LINK]

#Hippos4Life,

Rhonda, Co-Founder and CEO