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📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: July 2022 Update

📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: July 2022 Update

What's going right / wrong, lessons from our experiments, and our asks for you

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An associate at a tier one fund based in NYC
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(You get the first month free using the code 'Firstmonthconfl'.)

VC summers are real, and July and August are always slow.

If you're a company looking for money, and I had one piece of advice to give you right now:

Don't try to put anything on the calendar until September. Even if you get a meeting, it will be hard to get buy in from the rest of the team if they are all OOO.

Watch the full update below:

Metrics:

What went right:

We've had two new businesses sign up for our talent collective. We're contiuing to add more effort into building out our collection and improving the value prop to funds looking to hire. We think Confluence has become the best collection of venture talent in the world, and this allows funds to hire candidates directly from this talent pool. We've gotten a lot more signups since we started offering a free month and promoting the service in both newsletters. If you're hiring and looking for guaranteed intros to investors at some of the top funds, look no further.
Sent out our first few rewards to affiliates of the newsletter. We started our affiliate program last to reward those of you that share us with your friends. We've already had people sign up and start sharing, and we've sent out rewards to them as a small thank you. If you want to start getting rewards for sharing this with your friends, check out the bottom of this newsletter.
Started another newsletter focused on sharing Commonapp deal flow. Deal flow is the lifeblood for any investor, and getting in front of investors is the biggest challenge for most entrepreneurs. This seemed like a no brainer, and it's able to solve both. Since we started it last month, open rates are >50%, and CTRs are ~10%.

What went wrong:

Scrapped the agency. We wrote about this in our last update, but there has been low demand on the agency side, so we decided to scrap it and focus on the core business.
Removed the premium newsletter. We ran the premium newsletter for ~10 months as a way to recap the best conversations going on in our Slack group, share notes on our best deal flow, and provide value to our biggest supporters. We found that this type of content takes work, and th juice wasn't worth the squeeze anymore. The biggest takeaway we found (ironically) is that it is easier to monetize a free newsletter than a paid one.
Operated at a loss for the month. We had some big expenses for contract work, but we think it will pay off over the long haul. Still is no fun to operate at a loss.
The new Slack update will hurt the community. Slack changed the plans for their free plans, and it will likely hurt our community. The biggest change is that you will only be able to see 90 days of message history (compared to 10k messages like it is today). We have a couple of ideas on how to work around this, but if anybody has a connect to the Slack team, we would appreciate an intro.

July Media:

Asks:

We already touched on it, but the Slack update is a big one that will affect Confluence.

If anybody is close with the Slack team, and can put us in touch, it would mean a lot.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay and Tyler

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