📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: November 2023 Update

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Good morning 👋

Forbes 30 under 30 came out this week.

If you made the list this year, please don’t do anything to get added to this list down the road.

Enough of that.

November is over, which means you’re about to get hit with tons of “let’s circle back in the new year”. If you haven’t set yourself up for Q1, you should probably start doing that.

Anyways, here’s what we’ve been up to over the past month.

📌 P.S. We’re running our fourth annual VC comp survey. If you work full-time in venture, growth equity, or private equity, this is a chance to let us know how you’re compensated, and we’ll let you know if you’re over / underpaid.

Take the 2023 VC comp survey.

WINS

• Reached 9.1k unique site visitors. This is our largest month ever and 6.7% more than last month. We think this is due to a combination of redesigning the blog, becoming more active on Twitter, expanding the YouTube channel, and running deals on Black Friday.

• Twitter ads are working. Last month we shared the we were averaging $0.65 CPC to different lead magnets we ran through Twitter. We tested three, chose the best performing, and now we are pouring our ads budget into that one. We have averaged a 0.24 CPC for this (four leads for $1). If you are looking to get started with Twitter ads but struggling to figure out where to start, reply to this email, and we can try to help.

• Platform impressions are 25%+. We have become more active on Twitter (@confluencedotvc) through content and ads, and we have doubled down on our YouTube channel too. The goal for the Twitter is to capture the attention of those that like memes and short-form content; the YouTube is for people looking to learn more about investing through videos. We’re only two months in, and traffic has already started to compound on each platform.

• Revamped our merch store. Our old merch store was lacking, so we found a new partner. Take a look (linked here), let us know what you think, and give us a shout if there’s anything you think we should add.

• Ran Black Friday savings for different segments of readers. We’re not big fans of time-sensitive discounts, but we joined the massed and ran a few deals on our different offerings and from some of our partners. If you’re still looking, here are all the savings we shared.

• Created affiliates for all digital products. We like doing business with our readers, and an affiliate program is the easiest way to do that. We share 25-40% of the revenue on all of our digital products. All you have to do is sign up and start sharing.

• Created a free trial for funds to access to our talent collective. Here’s a demo of the talent collective for those that need a refresher. If you want to lock in a free month, use the code ‘MONTHONE’ at checkout.

LOSSES

• We have two programmatic SEO projects that we are behind schedule on. Putting together the databases has taken longer than we anticipated, and we are running behind schedule. We’re aiming to have this completed in the next two weeks.

• Current hiring is SLOW. A bad fundraising environment has downstream effects on hiring: if you can’t raise money, you can’t hire new people. That combined with the fact that late Q4 is a bad time to think about hiring has equaled a slog for us in terms of finding new clients this month. We think this will change going into Q1, so we are having as many conversations as possible to set funds up for success. If you are planning to hire new investors any time over the next six months, you should talk with our talent partner, Raegan, to develop an action plan.

MEDIA

Most popular:

From the blog / channel:

Resources:

❌ Mistakes of Omission: One of the best investor presentations I’ve read

🍀 Engineering Luck: An article I come back to at least once a year

🧠 Mental Models: 20 ways to look at the world differently

🔮 Predicting Trends: 10 ways that work

📶 Tiny Acquisitions Report: Takeaways from SMB M&A trends

📖 The Guide to Fund of Funds: How to make sense of FoFs

💰 Top ad spend merchants by company stage: Which platform should your company use?

🔍 Deepdive: A tool to help companies prepare for diligence questions

📶 400k / year community: How Daniel Vassallo monetizes Small Bets

🧠 Smart Things I’ve Read Lately: Morgan Housel’s latest bit of wisdom shared

📃 Jeremy Giffon napkin advice: How the GP at Tiny makes decisions

📝 37Signals Decision Making Guide: How their team makes decisions

➡️ Data-as-a-service blueprint: How to create a SaaS company in a weekend

✅ VC Notion Templates: Grab our best VC templates to duplicate into your account

ASKS

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

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- Clay and Tyler