📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: February 2024 Recap

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Good morning 👋

First one of the year since our last monthly update was more of a yearly outlook (here it is).

February was busy.

I was in and out of MIA + NY most of the month. I’m writing this on a flight back from LA. Slowly learning how to be productive while constantly on the move.

Here’s what we’ve been up to over the past few weeks.

P.S. This is longer than most of our other content, and the bottom half might get clipped by Gmail. To read the entire update online, follow the link below.

TL;DR:

• 📈 Pros

• 📉 Cons

• 👀 Outlook

• 🙏 Ask

• 🔎 Recap

PROS
What went right 📈

Passed 800k monthly impressions on paid ads. Finally starting to get the hang of paid ads, and I’m in the process of doing a write-up of all that I’ve learned so far. The TL;DR is that Twitter ads crush if you make an ad that people want to repost on your behalf, lookalike audiences are gold, video is better than static images for Facebook / Instagram ad creatives, and advertising in newsletters still works. Stay tuned for more as we document what’s worked for us.

Passed 250k free monthly impressions to our website. SEO is a LONG game, but a website that wins organic search traffic is an asset in the attention economy. There isn’t a quick hack to this, but what has worked recently has been adding a free downloads page, writing 3-4 new blog posts per week, adding recommendations at the end of every new blog post, and reorganizing our home page to include more of our written work.

Have 25 new recruiting leads. We’ve changed how we think about new email signups, and we now try to capture more information on new subscribers so we can reroute them to more specific ways that we can help them today outside of content alone. If you’re currently or planning on hiring new investment team members, let us know here so we can start putting together a game plan for your fund.

Started offering free consultations for Analyst-as-a-Service. One of the biggest pain points we’ve heard from members is that they want to outsource most of their back-office work. There' are only so many hours in a day, and we’d argue past a certain point, it’s not the best use of your time to be pulling together research, building a model, and doing all of the diligence work. That’s why we built Analyst-as-a-Service so that investors can outsource their back office at a fraction of the cost. We’re doing free consultations for funds looking to use. Here’s how to schedule yours.

Redesigned community overview page. This was overdue, and we think this page now gives a better glance at what all is included in a membership to the community. Let us know what you think.

Added three new free templates to our Free section. We’re adding more and more free resources to this page. If you know any founders that could use these, send it over to them.

Converting over to beehiiv as our de-facto CRM. Didn’t know if I should put this as a pro or a con, but we’re happy with where we’re at right now. We realized that we have a TON of first-party data from running this newsletter for 3+ years, so instead of transferring that out to another service, we’d rather keep it clean and run things directly from one platform. beehiiv continues to be the best software tool we use.

Added $575 in passive income from beehiiv boosts. beehiiv pays you to recommend other newsletters as long as the new subscribers are quality and engaged readers. Lucky for us, you all meet both of those criteria, and we’re earning a few bucks every month by recommending other newsletters we actually read.

Added two new premium community members on the lifetime plan. Last month, we started offering a lifetime plan for community members who didn’t want to pay a subscription fee. So far, so good.

CONS
What went wrong 📉

Blog production slowed down. Content production can be a slog, and sometimes you have to reset to plan and avoid burnout. February was one of those months on the blog side of things. We’re looking to turn things around in March.

Got dunked on by @VCBrags. Don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. I laughed when I saw it tbh, and it ended up bringing in 100k new impressions to this thread. All press is good press?

Gumroad free product upsells are not converting at the rate we initially thought. We’re not trying to be an info product business, so we’re not spending too much time looking into this. Our strategy was to make most of our Gumroad products free (get them here) and upsell the core asset (The Ultimate VC Resource Library) at a discount. Right now it’s converting at ~12% which isn’t bad, but we originally thought it would be higher.

We’re behind on a YouTube shorts strategy. I lose sleep over not developing a YouTube strategy sooner. The reach on that platform is truly insane, and we’re leaving attention (and money) on the table by not building something more durable there. Hopefully, that starts to change by the next update.

OUTLOOK
What I’m thinking through 👀 

Our three pillars for the year are building the audience, growing income, and stacking equity in the process.

Here’s what I’m thinking through and testing for each of those.

Audience

Our newsletter is our core asset, and we have goals to hit 15k newsletter subscribers by the end of the year (ideally sooner).

That can’t happen without great reader engagement + profitable reader acquisition.

On the reader engagement side, we’re seeing great retention and engagement compared to other newsletters, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We’re also adding more guest posts to help audience members put their best pieces of content in front of our audience, so if you have something you’re proud of, let us know.

On the profitable reader acquisition side, that’s where I’m spending most of my time thinking.

We’ve now tested ads on Facebook / Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Google, and beehiiv. We’ve found that Facebook / Instagram, Twitter, and beehiiv are where we will spend our budget going forward. I’m writing a deep dive of what I’ve learned for each, and I’ll share that once it’s written.

Google is too expensive (we also rank high for a KW around best VC newsletters). Reddit drove high-quality readers, but it was much more expensive compared to other channels (plus we get 30-40 referrals from sharing one of the top posts of all time in one of the top VC subreddits).

I’m also spending more time thinking and building free CAC channels. I’m doing this by expanding our number of free downloads, building more programmatic SEO directories, improving the fulfillment of our newsletter referral machine, and I’m toying with the idea of newsletter giveaways to incentive more referrals.

Income

We’ve found that we have a broad audience combined with a broad list of offers. We can’t bucket everybody into one category, and we’re doing more work on the backend to understand what each audience member needs.

We’re doing this so we can better match different personas with different core offers. We think this leads to better conversions, more revenue, and more audience loyalty.

Our audience generally falls within three categories:

• Investor: Somebody working full-time as an investor in venture capital, growth equity, private equity, family offices, or as an LP. We’re segmenting these readers further by grouping out junior investors (analysts, associates, principals) and senior investors (partners, general partners) since each of these groups have different priorities.

  • Junior investors: These readers are mostly interested in resources that will help them move up the chain of command (training, tools to do their job more effectively, deal flow, investor frameworks, better co-investment communication channels). These are the types of workers we originally built our private community for, so we’re rerouting new readers to join the community if they haven’t already.

  • Senior investors: These readers are mostly interested in ways to gain more operational leverage without breaking the bank. We help them do that by hiring better investment teams and outsource busy work they should not be spending time doing themselves. We have started asking whether or not new subscribers are hiring in our signup form so we can better reach these people at the right time.

• Founder / startup employee: We’ve found these people primarily care about securing capital and growth. For securing capital, we have a roster of free resources (most notably our funds database and our list of pitch deck mistakes to avoid). For growth, we’ve found that growth means different things to different folks. So we try to drill down where exactly these people need growth help, then we steer them in the right direction. If / when these folks are ready, we also offer consulting.

• Somebody interested in learning VC: This is the most broad group. Some of these people work in other finance roles. Others work in other parts of the startup world. Others are students. We assume that education is the primary need for these readers, and we send over the best free things that we have built for learning VC. If and when they are ready, we also tease our paid products along with consulting if they are engaging with emails.

Equity

Equity growth for us comes in two forms:

1. Growing the equity value of Confluence as a business

2. Growing the equity value of companies we invest in through our syndicate

The syndicate is somewhat hard to manage with a full-time gig, so we’re always looking for talented people who want to help manage things on the backend.

We share carry on all deals, so if you’re looking for more upside in your work, let us know by responding to this email.

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- Clay