📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: June 2023 Update

Good morning 👋

Did anybody get any work done last week? Asking for a friend.

We missed sending out our June update at the beginning of the month, so we’re sharing it a few days late.

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

P.S. We’re polling newsletter subscribers to hear your story and share it on our blog. If you’re looking to get your name out there, take two minutes to tell us how you got to where you are.

• Created LP lists for Confluence premium members. Most of the content within our premium package is geared for investors looking to take the next step (joining a private investor network, getting access to our member directory, getting bulk software discounts, finding better service offers to grow output, etc). Until now, we didn’t have much information on LPs, but we’ve started changing that. Premium members now have access to a list of hundreds of fund of funds, family offices, and foundations, and more LPs will be added soon. Check it out here, and let us know what you think.

• Started building a new resource for conversion optimization. Traffic doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t able to convert and of it. Capturing attention and cutting through the noise is a skill that will never go out of style, and that’s why we’re building a resource library for some of the highest-converting ads we’ve found in newsletters, print, on Twitter, Instagram, or out in the world. We’ll offer a pre-sale discount to those of you interested before we go live with anything.

• Started a new content section to share lessons from some of the most notable VCs in the world. Investing is great because you can always be improving something. Being a great investor is a lifelong pursuit, and there is always something new you can learn from others farther along in their journey. We’ve started researching and doing deep dives on world-class investors from USV, Sequoia, and Cowboy, we’ve received good feedback from you all, and we’ll keep doubling down on this content strategy.

• Started testing new ads for our community. We’ve started a swipe file taking some ideas from the project we noted in the section above. Can you let us know which one you like the best?

• Boosts through beehiiv is the only channel we’re using for new newsletter subscribers. We talked about this last-time, but this a huge feature and one that every newsletter writer would love to use. Instead of testing different things on Twitter or Facebook ads, you can find engaged readers that are already subscribing to other newsletters, are interested in related content, and are affordable. We’re averaging ~10 new boosts subscribers per day, and we’re only paying $1.50 per new reader.

• Had our highest-grossing month for digital product sales. We’ve started advertising The Ultimate VC Resource Library in some of these newsletters, and we’ve also listed it on Gumroad instead of only hosting it through Stripe payment links. The results? More sales.

• 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.

• Fixed page speed issues on our website. Unsexy problem to work on, but this was affecting our traffic. Shoutout to our Wordpress developer for helping get this sorted out.

• We’re burning money testing Google Ads. Traffic ain’t cheap, but we’re happy with some of our initial tests. If anybody has any Google Ads experience, we’d love to trade notes.

• Our talent placements are taking longer than expected. This is somewhat expected since we haven’t ironed out our process for the recruiting side. We’ve teed up intros and are now following up with both sides to see where things land. Hopefully this gets moved to the wins column by this time next month. (Also if you’re looking to hire today or in the future, check us out).

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

🤠 Lessons from Aileen Lee (Managing Partner @ Cowboy Ventures): Lessons, quotes, and additional reading from the Cowboy Ventures MD

🌲 Lessons from Alfred Lin (Partner @ Sequoia): Lessons, quotes, and additional reading from the Sequoia partner

🔐 Lessons from Albert Wenger (Managing Partner @ USV): Lessons, quotes, and additional reading from the USV Managing Partner

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

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

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

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

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

Most-clicked resources:

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🔦 Programmatic SEO 101: How Failory gets tens of thousands of search visitors every month

🧠 Mental Models Megathread: 40 concepts to expand your mind

✍️ Content Repurpose System: How creators get more juice out of their content without burning out

🤖 Automation Workflow Spreadsheet: A Google Sheet to help with your automation process

📈 Compounding Optimism: Morgan Housel gives reasons for hope in the future

🤝 Email Capture Swipe File: How some of the best newsletters capture emails and grow their audience

💀 VC Contagion: Is VC killing itself?

🌎 Why AI Will Save the World: Marc Andreessen gives hope for the future

🤷‍♂️ 99 Brutally Honest Takeaways About Venture Capital: Our observations from working every role in VC

🍽 Eat What You Kill: Great breakdown on VC and how we got to where we are

🔦 How to Find LPs: How to use tech to build your LP list

✅ Free Markets Provide the Best Feedback: Naval gives his two cents

💰 We Study Billionaires: Good podcast to learn from the ultra wealthy

⚠️ Pre-Seed Investing and Risk: How Notation Capital thinks about the world

📝 How to Structure Scout Funds: Our friends at Sydecar are putting together a crash course of how to do exactly that

🧨 AI Canon: Aggregated resources to help you get up-to-speed on AI fast

📧 Email Marketing Course: Earn customers and make superfans

🏷 The Ultimate Guide to SaaS Pricing Models: Strategies and psychological hacks you can use

🌐 The Platform Engineering Approach to VC: Why new funds don’t hire old-school investors

🤖 Can AI Replace VCs? Experiments to test that thesis

📈 ConvertKit’s MRR Journey: How the email hosting platform scaled their MRR from $1,500 to $100,000 in 12 months

👀 Top Vertical SaaS Companies to Watch: Companies worth monitoring

🏢 Building a Venture Capital Fund of Funds Portfolio: Things to consider when building out your portfolio strategy

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We’re looking to grow our services businesses without lighting more money on fire.

Google Ads has a lot to unpack. We’d love some help.

If you’ve worked with somebody (ideally one with a track record with service businesses), we’d love to talk to them.

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