📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: July 2023 Update

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Good morning 👋

We’re officially in the summer slowdown period.

If you work in venture and you’re expecting anything to get done quickly, try again after Labor Day.

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

(This email is longer than usual and Gmail will probably clip part of it. Click in here to read the full piece in your browser.)

P.S. We’re hiring a person to handle newsletter sponsorships. This is a contract position that can turn into a full-time role. Here’s the JD for those interested.

What went right ✅

• New email subscribers for the month was 15% higher than any other month over the past two years. We think this is happening for three reasons: we’re creating more quality content (3x / week), we’ve expanded the types of content we are creating (news, investor deep dives, and community recaps) to appeal to a wider audience, and we’re doing more outbound to people we think should be subscribers. The end result is a larger, more engaged audience that gives us more leverage. Shoutout beehiiv for making this happen.

• Reached 1k clicks through search over the past month. There are dozens of ways to get traffic. Winning organic search traffic is arguably the slowest way, but it creates a moat around your business. We fully invested into search back in the fall, and we’re starting to see some of the fruits of that labor. More clicks = more engagement = more interest = more referrals = more revenue.

  

• Created more niche VC content for investors navigating their venture career. Here’s a sample of some of that content. The goal is to help investors start, navigate, and upgrade their careers in venture. This is written by us, and it is pulling from the lessons we’ve learned escaping the junior VC rat race.

• Expanded LP lists for Confluence premium members. Everybody working in venture knows how hard it is to find and get introduced to the right LPs. We’re solving for the first part of that equation by creating more targeted lists of limited partners and sharing that with premium members of Confluence. Premium members now have access to a list of hundreds of fund of funds, family offices, and foundations, and we are adding more LPs soon. Check it out here, and let us know what you think.

• We have ~100 resources for our conversion optimization swipe file. Last month, we started collecting the best ads we have found. We’ve broken it down by platform, and we have some of the highest-converting ads for newsletters, print, on Twitter, Instagram, or out in the world. We’ll share this with Confluence members soon, and will offer a pre-sale discount to non-members. Stay tuned.

• Restarted our premium subscriptions for this newsletter. For those that have been around for a while, we paused a premium subscription last summer because it was starting to be too much work to create another article every other week. We’re picking this up again because ads have started creeping into our newsletters, and we know ads suck. So, premium subscribers will get the same content from us, but with a better experience since they won’t have to read through any ads; more signal, less noise. If that sounds interesting, I’ve linked our upgrade page. We really appreciate the interest.

What went wrong ❌

• Free-to-paid subscriptions have stalled. Our community operates on a freemium model: accepted members get access to a watered down version of the community for free, and paid members get the red carpet treatment. Our free-to-paid conversion is higher than the industry average, but we’re struggling to make this conversion higher. We’ve tested a few different approaches, but we think we might be reaching the optimization point.

• We had a huge jump in pages that aren’t being indexed by Google. This means a number of pages are not being shown in search results. This affects site traffic, so we’ve been working with our Wordpress developer to get it sorted out.

July media 📺

Most popular:

📶 17 Ideas from Alfred Lin (Partner @ Sequoia): Identifying motivation, growth sins, and developing storytelling superpowers

📶 11 Ideas from Amish Jani (Founder @ FirstMark): Economic constraints created through bear markets, identifying the "why", and why you have to prioritize ownership for VC math to work

📶 19 Lessons from Andrew Braccia (Partner @ Accel): Founder underwriting, developing storytelling superpowers, and building personal brand without being loud on the internet

📶 13 Lessons from Andy Rachleff (Co-Founder @ Benchmark): What to look for when hiring, a simple way to be a better storyteller, how to be a good board member, and creating products that sell themselves

📶 The VC ecosystem broke the LP ecosystem: Why LPs are pulling back on venture investing, old-school due diligence, plus the eight best resources we found online last week

📶 The AI Mafia: New talent pools emerging from the AI boom, a venture math breakdown, plus our 10 best links of the week

From the blog:

🔥 99 Brutally Honest Takeaways About My Time In Venture Capital: Our updated list of what we’ve seen

🤝 Playing Long-Term Games: How to build relationships with the right centure capital partners

⭐️ Why Your Network (Actually) is Your Net Worth in VC: Why you’re only as good as your rolodex

📈 How to Build a Strong Network Within VC: How to get plugged into the right groups

📶 How I Built A VC Network From Nothing: My story of making a name for myself

🧠 How I Got Up To Speed In VC: My story of accelerating my process of not being the dumbest person in the room

🖌 Best Content Creation Tools and Software: 11 best tools + our recommendation

🔎 Best SEO Tools for SMBs: 12 best tools + our recommendation

📧 7 Best Newsletter Hosting Software Tools: Best places to write your newsletter

🧬 Best Startup HR Software: 10 best tools + our recommendation

🔦 Best Site Auditing Tools and Software: 10 best tools + our recommendation

✍️ Best Artificial Intelligence Copywriting Tools: 6 best tools + our recommendation

🤝 Investment Recruiters: The 39 Best Recruiters Focused on Venture Capital, Growth Equity, and Private Equity Placement

Most-clicked resources:

🛡 When to Dig a Moat: Packy McCormick details when it’s the right time for companies to think about their moat

📧 How the Best Newsletters Grew to 50k+ Subscribers: Peter Yang shares what has worked for the biggest newsletters

🎥 Mr Beast Masterclass: The biggest YouTuber in the world gives game for ten minutes

📝 Reforge Artifacts: Reforge shares their template library so you never have to start from scratch

📊 A Bootstrapped SaaS Journey to $10K MRR: The founder of Bannerbear shares the good, bad, and the ugly of how he reached $10k MRR

📶 The Road to $1M ARR: A bootstrapped founder documents his journey

🧠 10 Years of Money Wisdom: Thread by Shaan Puri on what he’s learned

🔎 Smart Things Smart People Have Said: Morgan Housel’s collection of wisdom

⭐️ How to Do Great Work: Paul Graham’s latest essay

📶 SaaS Growth Articles: Top articles from a SaaS founders that have scaled

🔑 Modern Meditations - Sam Lessin: How the GP at Slow Ventures thinks about philosophy, metrics, and AI

➡️ Reflections on 10 Years in VC: Shoutout to Harry for sharing in our Slack

📊 Programmatic SEO Case Study: How Ian increased site sessions 247%

Asks 🙏

Do you know anybody building autonomous agents?

We’re looking to automate tasks beyond what is possible with Zapier. We’re specifically looking for somebody that has built successful agents using AgentGPT or something similar.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk.

This month’s sponsor 📢

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We talk to software companies all day long. We’re guinea pigs for different products, and we’ve built our business on the idea of improving efficiency.

That’s why we created the Ultimate List of Tools to share the best software products we’ve found and use to run our business. This list gives you full breakdowns, and we’ve found discounts you can use if you’re ready to start becoming a paid customer to any of these tools.

Check it out here, and let us know what you think.

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

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

- Clay and Tyler

P.S. We’re hiring a person to handle newsletter sponsorships. This is a contract position that can turn into a full-time role. Here’s the JD for those interested.