Welcome, @MikePreuss! Visible looks slick and very useful for many of the investors/VC's on Product Hunt (cc'ing a few @byosko, @nchirls, @joshelman, @hnshah, @alexiskold, @Noah_L). How did you come up with the idea for Visible and why are you building it?

Admittedly, I haven't had to go through that process myself but know many founders that have lamented the monthly/quarterly reporting overhead and board meetings because of the time investment it takes. Reducing/eliminating the time-suck and increasing transparency has several advantages. That said, I imagine some founders don't want to be that transparent 24/7. Have you run into this hesitation and how do you address it, @MikePreuss?

@tommoor typical Buffer. So transparent. :)

I know at Buffer we gave a lot of our early investors access to our admin area... kind of an MVP of this :-)

I'm an investor in a competitive product, so I won't comment specifically on Visible, but I do think there's a constant communication issue b/w founders and investors. Admittedly, I understand that total transparency for founders is hard, but generally I'd say that the minute founders stop communicating, investors lose interest and suspect that the shit has hit the fan. So you lose if you don't communicate anyway...

Sounds really interesting. i've been looking for a product like this for awhile. I've hacked together something that I share with investors. It is relatively time intensive for me, I'd much prefer to have an easy to use CMS that gives me controls. I've checked out a product or two "like this" before. Both had a severe lack of flexibility. Basically letting me share things like burn rate or monthly revenue, but not the actual metrics/insights my investors typically care about. I've signed up, hoping to give it a whirl soon!

@MikePreuss this looks fantastic. very well designed! as an investor running a fund, the portfolio management toolset is pretty nifty. definitely going to take a look. a few thoughts: - as a founder, I remember the time and effort it took to produce weekly or monthly reports. most were built off local files, like Excel or PPT, and it was a pain for version control. can I share such files inside Visible or only provide metrics that editable in the dashboard? - we eventually reverted our investor communication to email, which forced us to be concise and clear with what we wanted to communicate. looks like you have that via a "Highlights" section in an email WYSIWYG editor. I suspect the email communication channel will be big growth opportunity for you across founders. - like the world of entrepreneurship, the world of VC is incredibly small as a few friends have started to suggest other PMT (portfolio management tools) out there. what's the big difference between Visible and others?

I'm a cofounder of Visible.vc feel free to AMA!

@rrhoover - We haven't seen too much hesitation. We let companies have granular controls over their metrics. E.g. this Angel investor can only see my key metric or this lead venture fund can see everything. I think there needs to be education around communication between companies and their investors. As @byosko mentioned, If things are not going well and you are not communicating that is a missed opportunity. Your investors may be able to interject and help if something isn't going well.

@daveambrose - thanks! We currently do not file sharing or storage. There are a lot of virtual data rooms, file sharing apps, etc out there. However, one piece of feedback we've gotten is not necessarily to store docs but link to them just so you know where they are. E.g. show me the deal docs for XYZ transaction. We would just link it up to your Dropbox or Box account. With that said, we want to make it as easy as possible to get data into Visible and not to cause any rework. Our metrics modal is just like any other spreadsheet app--you can drop, drop, copy, and paste from any other spreadsheet app. We use a jQuery plugin called Handsontable (http://handsontable.com/). We also use 3rd party authentications to help get data in (Google Analytics, Stripe, Quickbooks, etc). I'm familiar with a lot of the PMT solutions. Most are focused on extremely large funds or PE firms. They are usually incredibly expensive (> $50k a year), have hefty setup costs ($1k per company), and are very slow while not being easy to use. They are usually built on software from >10 years ago as well. These solutions are great for some investors but are usually overkill. In no particular order I think Visible is: 1) Easy to use and setup 2) Cost effective 3) Fast 4) Hands on (or hands off if you'd like) implementation and support I'd link to think Visible is positioning itself to be of value to the fairly new early stage community. Super Angels, Accelerators, Equity Crowdfunding, Synidcates, Micro-VCs, etc. Thx!

Thanks for having me @rrhoover! Visible was created by both founders and investors. We were either giving or getting updates via email, excel attachments, one-off survey monkey forms, etc. It all basically sucked. There was no easy way for founders to share their key info and no easy for for investors to take that info and A) get insights into it and B) use it for their own reporting purposes (LPs, Angel Groups, etc). Founders should spend their time building their companies and investors should spend their time helping those companies grow. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to key the key data to the right people. With the rise of transparency, early stage investment, syndicates, equity crowdfunding, and more we are very excited for the future. Anyone can feel free to email at mike at visible dot vc as well.

I just posted over in http://www.producthunt.co/posts/... how I was dying for a product that helped to manage investor relaionships, had highlight options, and email notifications, and boom, here it is! Thanks @MikePreuss I shall certainly be using this and look forward to testing it out! One thing I would love to see however would be the ability reach out to investors and actually state what you need the most (different to an update message as it would be more actionable). As someone with a fair few angel level shareholders I often get asked 'what can I do to help you?' and its actually suprisingly hard to manage that process and ensure our investors know (at the right time, with reminders) what we're seeking and what actionable things we need from them/their network. Then it becomes less of a one way 'push' process, and more of a two way push and pull process (which in my view, it should be at seed stage at least). Another tab with 'Requests' would make me a very happy bunny indeed :-)