📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: April 2023 Update

What’s up 👋

I’m in Miami for the next two days, so shoot a reply if you’re around and want to hang out.

Here’s what happened behind the scenes at Confluence this past month.

The purpose of these recaps is to show what’s working / not working, so you all don’t make the same mistakes.

If you have any questions or comments, leave ‘em in the comments, and we’ll respond as soon as possible.'

Let’s get into it.

• Doubled newsletter content to grow monthly impressions 66.88%. We think that every business can add value to their audience by combing through the news and giving their own spin on what matters and why. That’s the approach that we’ve taken with our new newsletter content strategy, and it’s worked well so far. If you’re looking for expert advice on how to start, grow, and maintain your newsletter business, we recommend checking out the Newsletter XP course from beehiiv.

• Created ten 60-second crash course videos on popular terms in our VC Glossary. Last month we mentioned that our YouTube channel needed an upgrade, and we stuck with the plan. This month, we made ten short videos (VC Terms: 60-Second Crash Courses) to simplify the most popular terms from our VC glossary into bite-sized pieces. We think that short-form content is here to stay, and this is our first attempt at leveraging short-form videos to capture attention from other platforms. We’ll keep you posted on how this goes.

• Landed our first two commitments for our recruiting service. In case you haven’t seen it advertised at the top of our newsletter over the past month or so, we’ve started a talent placement agency focused on helping venture capital and growth equity funds find the best investment talent without relying on traditional recruiters. We’re running ads (Google > any other platform for this type of service in case you were wondering), we’ve started conversations with hiring managers, and we’re starting to work with both sides to match people with the right roles. If you’re hiring and want help building out a world-class investment team, let us know.

• We were able to fix a page experience issue that was affecting discoverability of pages. Google will ding you for any number of things that they deem as something that will negatively effect the search experience for their end user. As you can see from the chart above, we were doing something wrong, but we were able to quickly fix it to get things back on track. If you’re all set up with Google Search Console, it’s a good idea to check every week or so to make sure nothing major like this is affecting your site.

• SEO is working, and unique site visitors are up 15.5% over the month. A lot of people have started to question whether investing into SEO is still a winning strategy; we think it is, and we’ve invested heavily into it over the past eight months. Regardless of what business you run, if you’re able to figure out traffic, you increase your odds of figuring out other issues. If you’re getting started with SEO today, we would highly recommend going with Wordpress (instead of Squarespace, Webflow, Wix or something else) for a website builder, Surfer for keyword research and content planning, Jasper for help building content (use as a writer so you can act as an editor; if you copy and paste AI-generated content, you become an enemy to Google and won’t rank), and Google Analytics for tracking.

• Found two Twitter ad formats that resulted in ~$1 CPC. Our email list is arguably our most important asset, so we’re spending more to build up our list with the right types of readers. We’re not trying to sell anything on Twitter; we just want to use it for newsletter signups. We’ll keep testing, but we’re pleased with this price to buy a potential new email subscriber.

• Our Typeform conversion rate for our recruiting service is lower than we want. This shows us two things: 1) we’re doing a good job of getting our intake form in front of people, and 2) we’re doing a bad job of making it easy for people to fill out the info needed to book a call. This is the last step of our recruiting qualification process, and we want to remove any unnecessary friction that results in drop off. We’ve tweaked the questionnaire to shorten it, and we’ll track how this changes conversion rates.

• We haven’t figured out the best customer acquisition strategy for our service businesses yet. We wrote about this last month, and we’re still in a similar spot. We’re testing ads, and we’re testing automated email campaigns, but we’ve found that the major of our serious leads have come from personal outreach through LinkedIn, phone, or email. Sometimes you can overthink solutions in business when the easiest one is just picking up the phone and asking.

• We haven’t finished our programmatic SEO project on the best investment recruiting firms. This is almost finished, but it should have been done already. The finished lists our recruiters will live on once complete.

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From the blog:

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🔎 The State of VC: What’s going on in venture capital according to one of the best fund of funds

🔢 AI Master List: Google Sheet with AI companies to watch

🛠 Build Once, Sell Twice: The best course we’ve taken on productizing yourself and scaling your work on the internet

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🔮 Lessons Learned From 3,000 SaaS Companies: Patrick Campbell of Profitwell covers his biggest takeaways

📜 Guide to No-Code Marketplaces: what you need to know about building, launching, and scaling a no-code marketplace

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🤖 Maker Minions: 101 automations for people that want to build more leverage for themselves

Is your fund hiring?

We’re testing out a more personalized recruiting service and are looking for feedback.

Respond directly to this email or let us know here if you need help finding the next member of your investment team.

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