📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: November 2022 Update

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Slow month with Thanksgiving and people starting to shut down for the holidays. 

We still managed to get a good amount done, and here's what else changed for us at Confluence since this time last month.

Revenue Metrics:

What went right: 

• Built a list of recommended tools for venture-backed startups. We've tested a lot of software, and these are the best ones we've found. We broke it up by categories, and we also created lists top-rated tools, no-code tools, and tools we use to run Confluence.

• Successfully transferred our site over from Squarespace to Wordpress. Not the sexiest update in the world, but this was WAY more complex than we originally thought. We had to work with a developer to get everything worked out (took us over a month), but we think this puts us in a better position over the long-term.

• Recreated the frontend of Commonapp.VC. We realized that we weren't getting the most out of Commonapp by keeping company data siloed in an Airtable database. We used Softr to create the frontend, and now visitors should have a much better navigation experience. You can filter companies by sector, stage, geography, and business model, and if you click into any of the company profiles, we'll provide more details along with recommended companies. This is still a work-in-progress, so let us know how you'd like to see this improved.

• Finished our programmatic SEO project for investor lists. Programmatic SEO is the future of content creation, and we realized we needed a way to leverage it in order to compete for attention. We decided to take our data on Confluence investors and slice that data up to create thousands of investor lists to capture long-tail keyword search demand. Organizing the data and setting things up with Wordpress has taken some time, but now we have 4,000+ landing pages that are queued up. If you're thinking through programmatic SEO, shoot us a message to see if we can help.

• Improved content creation systems. We've started investing more and more into creating content, and in order to scale this, we needed to improve on the process. The process right now has been something along the lines of: hire writers, use Surfer for keyword research, create a content editor, share Jasper login details with writers so they can create more output in less time, review work, publish and pay writers upon completion. It's obviously a little more complex than that, but we're still working on refinining things as we go. If anybody has a good process in place for scaling up SEO content, we'd love to talk.

• The talent collective passed 100 vetted investors looking for new VC roles. If you're looking to hire new VCs without the headache of qualifying candidates, there isn't a better resource. 

What went wrong: 

• Assure is shutting down. They've been a sponsor with us, so we're sad to see they're shutting their doors. We'll lose some revenue once they shut things down for good, but we'll survive. If anybody has SPVs hosted on Assure and they're looking to transfer things over, we'd recommend going with Sydecar.

• Operated at a loss for the month. We're investing more into the business, and it's resulting in us operating at a loss. Short-term wrong that we think will result in a long-term right.

• Slack has been quiet. We talked about this last month, but it seems like people have been Slacked out. We're trying to work through ways to give members more of a reason to check into Slack more often. If anybody has any ideas, we'd love to hear them.

November media:

Most popular:

👨‍💻 Our 2022 Tech Stack

🏠 Betting on opportunities in proptech

📈 Alternative ways to build track record 

From the blog:

📝 Guide to getting a job in VC

📩 Nine ways to monetize an email list

🤝 Secrets of VC deal flow and places to source deals

❓ VC Q&A

Jobs:

📌 Jobs drop #22

📌 Jobs drop #23

📌 Jobs drop #24

Deal flow:

🎯 Full list of 244 companies looking for funding

Asks:

Do you want more responsibility as a Confluence member?

We're thinking about hiring some current members to act as community leaders. Pretty lightweight gig that would mostly involve starting and organizing conversations within the Slack group.

If you're a current member and are interested in getting some more responsibility, just respond to this email to let us know.

Thanks so much for reading this far.

If you would like to start receiving these updates directly in your inbox, let me know and I'll make it happen. You can also reach either of us through Slack if there's anything else you'd like to collab on (we'll probably respond quicker in there compared to email).

Thanks again for your support and help!

-Clay and Tyler