Koykan today has more than 350 shareholders and investors. That number still amazes me. These are people who opened their doors, trusted me and my team, and decided to back a vision we are building day by day.
That level of trust creates responsibility — and with it, one essential question:
How do I keep every single investor informed in a structured, consistent and transparent way?
Not just with public updates, but with deeper, confidential insights into the business — financial analyses, strategic papers, long-term plans and the decisions behind them.
So I needed to build a communication system with two parallel lanes:
- A private, secure 1→N channel for shareholder updates
– confidential information
– financial results
– strategic decisions
– internal reports - A public weekly rhythm
– reflections
– what we’re building
– what we’re learning
– personal notes from the CEO seat
– shared across LinkedIn and the blog
A private engine + a public engine.
Simple to describe, very painful to implement.
Executive Summary (for the impatient)
If you strip the book down to its most essential point, it fits into two sentences.
If you don’t care about the details, here’s the short version:
- it took ~20 hours to set everything up end-to-end
- it took a surprising amount of ChatGPT conversations
- and it took another 8 hours to structure investor data, clean emails, create groups, verify contacts and send the first official messages
I now have both platforms running seamlessly — one for private bulk emails and one for weekly public communication.
All 350+ investors are finally inside one coordinated communication ecosystem.
If you want the longer story, read on.
How the Platform Was Built
1. Setting up WordPress (365weeks.com)
I have never personally installed or administered WordPress before.
So step one was:
- launch the site
- choose a design direction
- configure branding, colors, formats, responsive layouts
- build a clean blog structure
- design post templates
This became the foundation for all weekly communication.
2. Designing the blog experience
Once WordPress was live, I had to shape the actual experience:
- typography
- spacing
- templates
- content blocks
- newsletter sections
- visuals and interaction elements
A blog should be simple on the outside and a complete mess on the inside — and that’s exactly how mine behaved while I was working on it.
3. Setting up Brevo – the newsletter engine
Brevo became the platform for sending:
- public newsletters
- blog summaries
- weekly reflections
- long-form updates
I configured sender domains, templates, email verification, formatting, segmentation and deliverability.
This alone took hours.
4. Configuring the RSS feed automation
Every time I publish a blog post, Brevo now reads my RSS feed and automatically prepares a weekly newsletter summarizing everything I wrote.
One or two posts a week → one automated, clean, weekly update.
Zero manual work.
Zero manual work.
5. Setting up Odoo Email Marketing (for confidential communication)
Next, I needed a private mass-email engine for shareholders — something not public.
Inside our ERP (Odoo), I configured (thank you my IT guru for your precious help! – you will know who you are 🙂
- Email Marketing module
- mailing lists
- investor groups
- secure sender identity
- templates for confidential content
- attachments for financial documents
This became the channel for sensitive updates.
6. Cleaning and organizing contacts (Excel hell)
This part was… painful.
I pulled together:
- all investor contacts
- emails
- groups
- roles
- categories
- mailing lists
Then cleaned everything in Excel and imported it properly into both:
- Brevo
- Odoo Email Marketing
This was the last missing piece.
7. Writing the first messages and pressing send
Once everything was ready:
- I wrote the first investor emails
- prepared confidential attachments
- wrote the first blog post
- published it
- triggered both systems
And suddenly…
350+ investors received their first coordinated communication from me.
Final Thoughts
This was a bigger project than I expected.
But it was worth every hour — because investor communication is not a checkbox. It is a discipline.
If someone gives you their trust and their capital, the least you can do is keep them informed, included and respected.
Now I finally have the infrastructure to do that — both privately and publicly.
Huh!