📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: September 2022 Update

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

September 29, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

1,612 members 👥 from 1,253 unique funds 💸 across 118 different cities 🌎  

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Weird month. Here's what happened in my personal life:

  1. Spent 18 hours in a car moving across the country. (I'm staying in Austin now if anybody wants to say what's up.)

  2. Lost my phone and had an identity theft scare (had to start over with my bank, credit cards, and brokerages). Strongly recommend never letting this happen to you.

  3. Launched more Confluence-related content and updates than any other month this year. More details on all of that below.

Can't think of any lessons to apply here. Maybe chaos is good?

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

What went right:

  • We made our roadmap public. Let us know what features we should add next. We're prioritizing things based on how many votes they have.

  • We audited and cleaned our directory. People switch funds and locations more often than you'd think, and we wanted to make sure everything was up-to-date. We expect to do this more frequently going forward.

  • We made part of our investor directory public and shared it on Product Hunt. We've segmented all Confluence members by who they are, where they are, and what they invest in, and we think this will result in more quality inbound deal flow for members once they're inside. This raises the value proposition for joining the community.

  • Started creating an 'Investor Lists' section on our website. The goal of this has been to a) create more content in areas we're familiar, b) capture more search demand from our intended audience, c) increase unique site visitors, and d) convert more of those site visitors to act on one of our offers.

  • Rebuilt the 'Founders' section of our website. Confluence has become more confusing as we've added offers. We're overdue for a website cleanup, but this page makes is now much easier to navigate for those that choose to click into it after finding us for the first time.

  • Started building a 'Tools' section on our website. The goal of this was to add more public value to give people more of a reason to visit our website. Ideally as this grows, it allows us to capture more search demand, earn more emails, and increase our reach and number of offers to more qualified website visitors.

  • Joined early access to the beehiiv ad network. This should help us spend less time chasing down sponsorship opps, target companies with relevant offers, and (hopefully) better monetize ourselves. As a reminder, we partner up with companies and brands that are aligned to what we already offer. If you want to partner up on something, let us know what you're thinking.

  • Started working on frontend improvements to Commonapp. We think we're leaving search demand (and money) on the table by not having Commonapp shown more publicly. We're currently featuring companies in the newsletter and in the members homepage, but we feel like we have work left to do to make this more of an asset for our brand. We should have more to share by this time next month.

What went wrong: 

  • An early sponsor did not renew which led to a ~20% reduction in MRR. One of our first sponsors needed to cancel their renewal. We're glad they were early supporters, but this cancellation made a negative dent in our ARR. 

  • Had to skip a week of sharing Confluence.VC Weekly. I had my phone stolen earlier in the month which became a huge issue and personal distraction. This resulted in us skipping our first weekly newsletter in over two years.

  • Found a bug in our member home that was causing login issues for some users. We tested a third-party app to help new members with onboarding and getting the most out of their membership. We found that this slowed down page loading speed and actually ended up hurting our onboarding process, so we called it quits.

Revenue update:

September Media:

Most popular:

From the blog:

❓ VC Q&A

Jobs:

Deal flow:

🎯 Drop #11

🎯 Drop #12

🎯 Drop #13

🎯 Drop #14

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.

You can 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. We'll see you next week.

-Clay and Tyler

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