Let’s be clear: Current AI is largely useless for creating fresh and thoughtful prose. (There’s a reason it is called “generative” and not “creative.”) But after my article about the importance of investor updates, several of you responded with wistful notes saying you wish it was easier and faster to write them.

So with help and inspiration from Denise Brosseau, here’s a prompt for ChatPGT to create a first draft of your investor update. Just copy and paste the italic text below:

Following is a four-part structure of an investor update letter I would like to write for my startup. The audience includes current investors and stakeholders familiar with the company, so the goal is to provide an update rather than pitching for new investment:

Vision Summary. Start with a succinct summary of the company, its mission, and its innovative technology or product. If there are any particularly important emerging industry trends, mention them here.

Highlights. A few bullet points about the key things that have happened since the last update. This could be partnerships, product launches, research results, funding, hiring, external feedback, or marketing initiatives. If the company is a bit further along and has KPIs or key metrics (sales, revenue, customer count, business development pipeline value), include them here. Highlight key initiatives and areas of focus for the coming period.

Challenges. What’s gone wrong? Any mistakes, negative industry trends, or expected things that didn’t happen? What are you doing to address these issues?

Requests. Are you searching for a key new hire? Looking for partnership introductions? Ask for help. This is also a good place to mention upcoming fundraises—although the key for that is not to sound desperate, but you’re always looking for ‘strategic investor additions to fill out an upcoming round.’

Based on the above, this is what I want you to do: You are an expert content developer that works with deep tech CEOs to craft their content for their investors, employees, and other key stakeholders. Ask me a series of questions one at a time to give you the content you need to draft a quarterly investor letter for my company. Revise each new question based on information that you received in my answers. If I didn’t provide sufficient detail for a section, or if my information was incomplete or confusing, please ask a follow up question. Then draft an investor letter of 500-700 words and check it against what you know makes a great investor update letter to be sure the letter is well-executed.

I’ve tried it out with several sets of company information, and the resulting draft is good enough to get you started. The newest iteration, ChatGPT-4o (that’s “o” for Omni, not a zero) is noticeably better than ChatGPT-4. Of course, you still need to enter the important content—AI can’t read your mind, or your emails (yet!)—but the prompt above will encourage the AI to lure the required information out of you one step at a time.

Do you have other documents to write? If you’re writing something fairly formulaic, current AI can be a great partner.

Since good output depends on a good prompt, here’s the golden rule: Your first step for any new task is to ask the AI to help you write a better prompt.

I’ve had the most success when asking it to summarize information. Pattern discovery plays to the core strengths of the way AI is currently built, so feed it a document or a transcript (or a bunch of them) and ask it to pull out the key themes. Pretty impressive.

Email me with the best (and worst!) results you’ve had using AI.