📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: March 2024 Recap

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Good morning 👋

Another month of shipping, growing the biz, and cleaning up things on the backend ✅

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

(Gmail likes to clip these monthly recaps, so click the button to read the entire piece in your browser.)

TL;DR:

• 📈 Pros

• 📉 Cons

• 🙏 Ask

• 🔎 Recap

PROS
What went right 📈

📶 Earned ~900 new subscribers after sharing our latest VC comp report. Collecting this data and together a meaningful dataset is hard. So is writing the report with the right amount of useful information, so it’s rewarding to see tons of high-quality new subscribers from all of this work.

↘️ Reduced costs per subscriber 34.6%. We’re still drinking from the paid ads firehose, and we’re learning something new every day. All ads right now are running to grow our email list. We’ve done a good job of creating the right types of audiences to target, but now we’re spending most of our time on making better creatives to drive down CPCs so we can spend our budget more effectively. We still have a ways to go before we reach our CPA goal, but we’re on the right path.

↗️ Passed 300k free monthly impressions to our website. This is up from 250k this time last month. We’ve invested a TON into SEO, and it’s finally starting to pay off. 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.

💲 Revamped affiliate program for Confluence members. We have a belief that there is a huge income opportunity for online communities, and we think the communities that create income opportunities for their members will have a massive opportunity over those that don’t. Confluence members now earn $100 for every new premium member they refer. Here’s how members can sign up to become an affiliate and start earning.

📺 Acted on YouTube Shorts strategy (and starting to see results). Last month, I wrote about a regret of not creating YT Shorts strategy sooner. Well, we acted on it, it’s now driving eyeballs and subscribers to our page.

📢 Booked five new sponsors for the newsletter. Shoutout to beehiiv for helping with most of this. If you’re looking for more ways to sponsor Confluence, here’s our sponsorship page.

👋 Created eight welcome funnels based on personas. This was a lesson I wish I would have learned earlier. Every person / reader / customer that follows you / your business has a different objective. If you aren’t segmenting people based on their persona and objective, and you’re trying to send everybody through the same funnel, you’re going to have low conversions because your offers are not relevant to the bulk of your audience. The more you segment, the more targeted you can be with your messaging, and the more targeted you can be, the more income you can create for yourself.

🚀 Added $526 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. Here’s an updated list of some of our favorite newsletters in our inbox in case you’re looking for other things to read.

💯 Passed $100 MRR for the premium newsletter. Small win here, but this validates there is demand for the premium newsletter. If we pass $1,000 MRR, we can start hiring somebody to take this over. Here’s to upgrade and start seeing our thoughts on our favorite deals for $10 / month.

CONS
What went wrong 📉

🙃 Taxes. Keeping this recap shorter than others because I’m in the process of losing my mind filling out taxes.

REFER
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ASK

We’re trying to do a better job of helping each person who reads this newsletter.

In order to do that, could you spend 15 seconds telling us a little more about who you are, what type of content you’re looking for, and anything else we can do to help?

It would mean a lot 🙌

RECAP
The best content you missed last month 🔎

Investor Frameworks

Deep Dives

News

Deal Flow

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

P.S. I’ve started to offer paid consulting for people looking to get access to my brain.

Whether you’re looking for advice on media strategy, turning your email list into an asset for your business, building an online community, running paid ads, or have general questions about VC, I’d love to help.

Here’s how to schedule time.