I had coffee today with a founder I see every 90 days. He’s pre-PMF, mostly solo, a couple friends helping. He always closes the same way, grateful for the time and the perspective. On the way out I gave him the next move: “If you want to take this to the next level, start emailing me weekly. Treat me like an investor.”

The email is a forcing function disguised as a communication tactic. Two things make it work: a weekly cadence and a named audience. The cadence makes vagueness expensive over time. The audience makes journaling impossible. If you’re doing something hard and you have anyone who’s said “let me know how I can help” (startup, job search, side project, whatever), you should be sending this email.

What goes in it

The clearest example I have is from April 2025. My former co-founder Max Cameron sent a weekly update during his job search after fforward wound down. Same shape as a founder update, different funnel. Six sections:

  • A one-paragraph frame. Why this list exists: permission, accountability, reflection, asks. Sets the contract with the reader. Max opened his with “If you’re receiving this update, it’s because I’ve explicitly asked for permission or I know you well enough that I’m confident you won’t mark it as spam :)”
  • What I’m looking for. The criteria (role, stage, sector) specific enough that someone could match it to a name in their head. For Max: “Senior IC Product Manager, Series A/B/C, AI application layer, vertical SaaS, SalesTech, MarTech.” For a founder, this is your ICP.
  • The Process. Every step from “they don’t know we exist” to “we’ve delivered them value,” and where each name in your pipeline sits today. (I borrow the term from Gino Wickman’s Traction. “Funnel” is too abstract, people fudge it.) For Max it was outreach → recruiter call → first interview → assignment → final. For a founder it’s your sales motion. Each item is a noun, not a vibe.
  • What I accomplished this week. Key activities and the outcomes they produced. Activities are fine if you have a hypothesis they drive outcomes, and you’re willing to kill them when they don’t. “Met with 14 prospects, great conversations” with no “and 0 said yes” is theater.
  • What I hope to accomplish next week. Plan, written down so it can be wrong. You’re publishing a commitment.
  • How you can help. Specific asks. By name where it makes sense.

Six sections. Five minutes to read, twenty minutes to write if you’re being honest, two hours if you’re hiding from yourself.

The discipline is concentrated in two places. The Process is the first. “Still figuring out positioning” or “early conversations going well” is where most founders hide. If you can’t write down which companies or customers are at which step, you don’t have a Process; you have a list of meetings. The second is “how you can help.” Most updates I see list zero real asks, just gratitude. That’s not an update, it’s a postcard.

A weekly cadence makes vagueness expensive. You can hand-wave once. You can’t hand-wave four weeks in a row to the same eight people. By week three you either have a concrete hypothesis or you’ve admitted you don’t, and both of those beat the indefinite middle.

The audience does the parallel work. Writing for someone real, who you know will read this on Friday, is a different cognitive task than writing for yourself. You can’t help editing for their mind while you’re forming the thoughts. Without an audience, the same hour at the keyboard produces journaling.

CC, not BCC

I learned this from Nick Candito, one of our angels at fforward, who obligated me to do it. The rule: everyone goes in the CC line, and you call people out by name with what you need from them.

Cameron: you mentioned someone in your network at [redacted]. Still good for an intro? Sarah: would love your take on the pricing change before Friday. Everyone else: if you know an ops lead at a 50–200 person services company, that’s our ICP this month.

The BCC version doesn’t work. Without visibility, advisors get lazy (not maliciously, just gravity). Nobody wants to be the angel who’s visibly not helping, so public asks flip the default from “I’ll think about it” to “I should reply.” You’re telling people: I value your time enough to ask for a specific thing, and I’m not pretending the rest of the list doesn’t exist.

The flip side: writing public asks means writing good asks. “Any intros would be great” gets ignored. “An intro to a Series B founder who’s sold into hospital procurement in the last 18 months” gets forwarded.

The email is portable

When Max’s April 25, 2025 update hit my inbox, I forwarded it to Martha, a PM in my network who’d been an early fforward customer. She knew Max from that era but wasn’t on his job-search list. She replied:

“Really interesting tactic to send updates about his job search. Never seen that before — a true PM through and through.”

She later introduced Max to a client. That intro turned into a contract.

The email isn’t just a status report to its named recipients. It’s a portable artifact. Three people did their part: Max wrote an email worth forwarding. I forwarded it because Nick’s CC-everyone rule had trained me to treat updates as routable, not private. Martha, who already knew Max’s work, was willing to vouch on the strength of what she read. None of those three pieces work alone.

Why almost nobody starts

I’ve told this to a lot of people over the years. Maybe two have actually started. I think it’s two things:

1. The blank page. “Send a weekly investor update” sounds like a category of business writing you need to research. It isn’t. It’s a six-bullet email. The mental model of “investor update” is what kills it. People imagine a deck, a metrics dashboard, a polished narrative. The actual artifact is closer to a Slack DM with structure.

2. Identity. Writing down your asks feels like admitting you can’t do it alone. It reads, in the writer’s head, as begging. This is exactly backwards. Vagueness is the disrespectful version. It asks your supporters to do the work of inferring what you need. A concrete ask is the respectful one. It says: I’ve thought about this, here’s what would move me, your time isn’t a fishing line.

If you’re not sure which one is blocking you, write the email anyway and notice which sentence you stall on. That’s your answer.

Honestly, I don’t receive many of these. The ones I do tend to fail two ways. First: they come every three months instead of every week, usually because the writer is afraid weekly would feel spammy. It doesn’t. This is the same fear lifecycle marketing teams have about unsubscribe rate. Almost everyone underestimates the cap, and an unsubscribe is the signal you wanted anyway: the people who ask off the list weren’t really going to help. Second: when an update does come, it’s so abstract you finish reading and can’t name a single thing the founder needs you to do. The cadence didn’t help these writers because they weren’t willing to be specific enough to be wrong.

This only works if you’re willing to be specific. If you can’t, the email won’t fix you. It’ll generate a paper trail of evasion. The cure is the same as the disease: write, get more specific each week, let the format pull the discipline out of you. Or quit after a month and admit it wasn’t for you. Both are fine. Hand-waving for another year is not.

There’s a related framing in release trains aren’t about releases. Cadence reshapes the question you’re asking yourself. “What can I ship in 6 weeks” produces different work than “what can I ship today.” “What do I send Friday” produces different work than “how’s it going.” Same mechanism, smaller surface.

You know what to do. Pick eight people. Put them in the CC line. Six sections, twenty minutes, Friday. Call me out by name in the asks. I’ll read it, and so will the other seven.

If you write three of these and nothing happens, tell me and I’ll read them all again. If you write zero, you have your answer about something other than the email.

Process note: Drafted from a conversation today + my own notes on Max and Nick. AI was used for structure and line edits, not for sourcing claims or relationships.