Write an investor update that doesn't bury the bad news
The update that builds trust is the one where the hard part is easy to find.
- Use it for
- Founders writing a monthly or quarterly investor update.
Most investor updates read well and communicate poorly, because the bad news gets buried under three paragraphs of context, hedged into vagueness, or filed under "challenges" in a way that reads as boilerplate. Investors who've read a hundred of these can tell instantly when a founder is managing their perception instead of reporting reality, and it costs trust exactly when trust is most useful — when you actually need help.
This prompt asks for the honest version first, then makes it readable, rather than starting from the polished version and hoping the substance survives.
When not to use this
If you're not being fully honest with yourself yet about how things are going, fix that first — this prompt makes bad news clearer, it can't manufacture honesty you haven't decided to have. Also skip it for a routine update with nothing hard to report; don't invent drama.
Did this work?
An investor skimming just the first two lines of your "challenges" section would know the real problem, not a softened version of it.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.