📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: October 2022 Update

What's going right / wrong, lessons from our experiments, and where we could use help

Author

Clay Norris
October 27, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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Personal life update: I'm full-time on Confluence now.

For those that didn't know, I worked at Visible for the past 18 months. This was by far the best job I've ever had, and I learned a TON about how great startups operate behind the scenes. Eventually, I realized I was stretching myself too thin and needed to focus on Confluence, so I made the jump earlier this month.

Two major takeaways from this experience:

  1. Junior VCs should work at a startup. You will be forced to learn, you are evaluated on output, and (most importantly) it will give you better judgement. Nothing is less helpful than somebody giving advice without anecdotal evidence. I was one of these people when I worked in VC, and thinking back on that makes me cringe.

  2. The majority of VC tech stacks are ironically terrible; the best funds think the most about operations. There are obviously exceptions to this, but I've now seen a lot of tech stacks, and generally this holds true. Tier one funds are methodical about how they operate, and they are investing heavily into their tech stack. Less impressive funds don't do this, and they have little-to-no repeatable systems. The funds that are investing into better systems are mutiplying their output and creating a compounding advantage against these other funds that are ignoring their operational component. In other words, the winners are going to keep on winning, so you should start following in their footsteps if you don't want to fall behind. Also, if you're looking for better investor reporting, you should use Visible. I'm not affiliated anymore, but their product is truly best in class and will make your life easier.

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

Revenue Metrics:

What went right:

  • Established a programmatic SEO plan. This has been top of mind for some time. The goal is to push out 1,000+ web pages using data we have already gathered. We've been going DEEP on how to do this programmatically so that we frontload the work (nobody wants to manually create 1,000+ pages) and don't piss off Google (the content on each page has to be unique and valuable in order to pull this off). This is becoming incredibly complex, so if anybody has experience building out something similar, I'd love to talk to you.

Screen Shot 2022-10-25 at 9.04.28 AM.png

  • Built Signal Tracker as a dealflow tool. I wanted to show our audience what you can build without writing code, and I made this using no-code apps. To see a more detailed writeup on how to build something like this for yourself, check out this piece that walks through the build step-by-step.

Screen Shot 2022-10-25 at 9.05.39 AM.png

  • Started using Jasper and Surfer to scale up and improve content creation. These are two of the most powerful pieces of software I've ever used. Surfer helps you figure out what types of content to write about, how to structure it, and what keywords you need in order to rank. Jasper helps you leverage AI to write content based on what you feed into the software. We'll have to do a write up on how we're using each of these, but the output so far has been incredible.

  • Started hiring writers for SEO and other blog content. If you're looking for an agency to work with or outlines to work with writers, let me know. Happy to share what I've learned.

  • Closed on a new sponsor for the newsletter. We locked in a new sponsor earlier this month. As a reminder, we only work with companies that have relevant offers to improve the lives of you all. If you are interested in checking out any of our partnership packages, I've linked those here.

What went wrong:

  • Reached a breaking point with our website hosting platform. Without getting too technical, we realized that our existing site is not scalable, so we're having to migrate everything over to a new hosting service. We think this should help our web traffic grow at a much faster rate, and this migration should be done and ready to go by this time next month.

  • Slack has been quiet. We've talked to a good amount of members, and 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.

  • MRR is slightly down. We haven't had any big jumps in recurring revenue for the past few months, and we're working through how to get that solved.

  • We're still working on improving our talent collective. Job postings have slowed down over the past few months, and we've been focusing on more ways to a) build out the talent collective (up to 53 VCs looking for new roles in venture as of time of writing), and b) get that offer out to more funds looking to hire without the headache. If that second point resonates with you, see where we can help.

  • We're still waiting to be approved by Mercury for a credit card. Up until this point, we've been running Confluence on what's in the bank account. Mercury opened up a new credit card (which we've qualified for), but it's taking longer than expected to get approved due to a backlog of other companies looking for the same thing. We're hoping this is approved in the next 2-3 weeks.

October Media:

Most popular:

From the blog:

❓ VC Q&A

Investor lists:

Jobs:

Deal flow:

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

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