📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: May 2023 Update

Good morning 👋

It’s Clay. I hope all of you had a great Memorial Day Weekend.

Here’s our monthly email covering what we’ve been up to over the past month.

The purpose of these recaps is to show what’s working / not working, so those of you running an online business don’t make the same mistakes.

If you have any questions or comments, leave ‘em in the comments, and we’ll respond as soon as possible.

Let’s get into it.

P.S. I’ll be out in Southern California the next few weeks starting June 8 (Santa Monica / Venice area), and I’m planning meetings as we speak. If you’re around, shoot me a note.

• Started creating “best’of” lists to recommend software products we use. We’ve tested hundreds of pieces of software as we’ve built our our business. There are a handful of products love using, and we started this content strategy as a way to a) help our audience use the same tools that have given us more leverage, b) create more content that is relevant to our audience, and c) better align incentives with software vendors. To check out some of the articles we’ve already posted, check them out here, here, here, and here.

• Landed first client for our recruiting service (with two more close to signing). In case you haven’t seen it advertised at the top of our newsletter over the couple months, we’ve started a talent placement agency focused on helping venture capital and growth equity funds find the best investment talent without relying on traditional recruiters. We feel we’ve built the best community of venture capital talent in the world, and this service lets funds tap into that talent pool when it comes time to hire. If you’re hiring and want help building out a world-class investment team, let us know.

• Started a blog section to highlight more Confluence investors on our website. Everybody has a unique story, and we want to help our audience tell theirs. We opened up this survey form for the readers of this newsletter (that’s you) to give your elevator pitch. We’ll feature it on our website (example) and start sharing it in this newsletter so you can start meeting more interesting people. It’s six questions, and the form can be found here.

• Boosts through beehiiv has become our most effective CAC campaign. Growing a newsletter takes forever, and expecting people to sign up just because you consistently write good content doesn’t always happen. If you take growth seriously, you need to invest into it. That’s what we’ve done with beehiiv’s new Boosts feature, and it has resulted in 150+ new subscribers at an average cost of $1.50 per subscriber. For anybody that works in marketing, you know that’s an incredibly low acquisition cost, and the readers that are signing up are all engaged (~6% CTR).

• Our referral program is growing. We think that the best way to build any product is through organic traffic, and growing a newsletter audience is no different. Beehiiv helped us build our own referral program, and we’re starting to see more of you refer your friends to be subscribers. If you want free stuff from us, consider joining through the link below.

• We missed a week of newsletter content. This happens when other work piles up, but it slows down our momentum. In an ideal world, we outsource newsletter content production to somebody else, but we’re not at that stage yet.

• We need another EA. We have worked with EAs in the past, and we have already hired one through Upwork. We think we’re at capacity there, and we need to bring on and onboard somebody new. If you have any recommendations, let us know in the comments or shoot us a reply.

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Most-clicked resources:

📶 Meritech Public SaaS Comparables Table: One of the better datasets we’ve played around with for benchmarking

📈 Bootstrapping to 2m+ Users With Zero Employees: Great case study on how to scale without hiring staff

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< Fewer, But Better Is The Secret: F-O-C-U-S

⚕️ Levels Updates: Levels does millions in revenue and shares all of their investor updates publicly

🏰 Building a VC Firm That Lasts Centuries: The partners at Bessemer share what has worked for them

🗞 Our favorite course on the business of newsletters

➡️ How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You): Long piece by Tim Urban on how to actually choose a job, project, or business that works for you

📶 How to Grow a Community to 4,500+ Paying Members With 90% Retention: How Utopia did it

🎰 Use Optionality, Don’t Hoard It: The best things in life come from reducing optionality

📖 16 Best VC Newsletters to Subscribe To: Other places to check out if you like this newsletter

😢 After 18 Months, Your Investment Probably Isn’t Getting Marked Up: Sobering statistics from AngelList

🧲 Are you attracting the best audience? Scale isn’t everything

📺 The Unified Content Business Model: Ben Thompson breaks down the biggest issues with media businesses today

🎨 Ultimate Design Guide: 500+ design resources to bookmark

🤖 The AI Hot 75: NFX shares the startups worth watching

🪒 Favorite Rules & Razors: George Mack’s favorite rules for better thinking

🧠 There’s An AI For That: AI database for thousands of tasks

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