📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: August 2022 Update

1,875 members 👥 from 1,325 unique funds 💸 across 151 different cities 🌎

Join 👥 | Invest with us 📶 | Hire better 📌

The last 30 days have taught me that I can't predict what type of content will perform best.

I've done some exploring, and here are some things that I didn't expect.

1. Our most popular pieces (by open rate) are our deep dives on random topics.

2. Our most interesting pieces (by click-through rate) are these behind the scene pieces. (My family hates these and thinks we're idiots for sharing too much.)

3. Our most interesting publication (by click-through rate) requires the least amount of work.

Not sure if there is a lesson in there other than nobody knows what will happen until you hit publish.

Here's what's changed for us since this time last month.

What went right:

• Started selling team plans for premium membership. We found that larger funds want to give everybody on their team access without having each member apply individually. This allows us to increase LTV through higher subscription prices, and it allows teams to get the benefits of Confluence at a discount. If you want a group plan for your team, just reply to this email with the number of people you want to grant access, and we'll help get things sorted out for you.

• Close to finalizing a new sponsor for one of our newsletters. We now have three newsletters that go out every week. The core one (what you're reading now) is focused on highlighting Confluence members and updating each of you on what's going on behind the scenes. Confluence.VC Jobs shares some of the most popular listings from our job board every week. Confluence.VC Deal Flow showcases some of our favorite companies that submit their info to Commonapp. We only work with companies that offer something of value to our members. If you want to see if it's a fit, let us know what you're thinking.

What went wrong:

• Early entry automation has not resulted in any paid members yet. We added a new question at the end of our member signup form to see what plan a person is interested in (Basic or Premium). If a person selects Premium, it triggers an automation to grant them early access to premium - all they have to do is enter their credit card info. This is only a few weeks old, but since we've added it, 24.4% of responses have indicated they're interested in joining premium (that's good news). The bad news is that none of those have actually converted to premium yet.

• We had to upgrade our Slack plan. To skip the boring details, Slack changed their plans, the new free plan would make Confluence worse, so we bumped our plan. Just the price of doing business, but this will become a largest software spend. As an FYI for all existing members, you can now search through all messages ever shared in Confluence (no more 10k message limit). I recommend you take advantage of this by searching for keywords that others have talked about in the past - super easy way to find other co-investors with similar interests.

Revenue metrics:

Member metrics:

August Media:

Most popular:

📶 All the mistakes we've made running Confluence

📉 Online communities and the law of diminishing returns

💰 Venture alternatives and revenue-based financing

From the blog:

❓ VC Q&A: Crowdsourced, hard-to-find questions about every part of VC

📩 16 best VC newsletters to subscribe to: Who deserves your attention as a VC

🙅‍♂️ Why VC hiring sucks: Keys to understanding this process (and a solution to it)

🖌 Six takeaways to creating better content: How to level up your content game

Jobs:

📌 Jobs drop #9: 86 venture roles to choose from

📌 Jobs drop #10: 126 venture roles to choose from

📌 Jobs drop #11: 83 venture roles to choose from

📌 Jobs drop #12: 83 venture roles to choose from

📌 Jobs drop #13: 113 venture roles to choose from

Deal flow:

🎯 Drop #6: Memos on 182 companies looking for funding

🎯 Drop #7: Memos on 188 companies looking for funding

🎯 Drop #8: Memos on 193 companies looking for funding

🎯 Drop #9: Memos on 195 companies looking for funding

Asks:

Do you want your team to get access to Confluence?

Just respond to this email with how many people want access, and we can put together a team package for you.

Sponsor:

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Check them to run your first deal today.

Thanks so much for reading this far and giving us some of your attention this week.

-Clay and Tyler