📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: October 2023 Update

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Good morning 👋

And Happy Halloween!

I feel like October came and went quick. We’ve officially got two months left in 2023 (also crazy), which means you have roughly three weeks left to knock out your most important items before holiday season kicks in.

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

📌 P.S. We’re hiring: We're looking for a social media manager (somebody who loves venture and memes) to grow our Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Do you know someone who’s a good fit? Earn a $500 referral bonus when they reach a final interview.

WINS

• Built seven new lead magnets. One thing we’ve learned from studying the growth of different media companies? They give away a TON of things for free. We took an honest look at what we’ve built so far and thought we could improve. So we’ve started giving away our best resources for free in exchange for an email address. You can find some of those lead magnets at the bottom of this email.

• Doubling down on Twitter ads. We’ve tested advertising on a few different platforms, and we’ve had the most luck with Twitter. We’re currently running three campaigns, and we’re averaging $0.65 CPC to different lead magnets that we are using as the CTA of these campaigns.

• Brought on Raegan as our new talent partner. We have spent a lot of time thinking about recruiting, and we haven’t had the bandwidth to spend as much time as we would like on this part of the business. That’s why we brought on Raegan to take it over, and she comes with eight years of experience building teams through recruiting. If you are a fund with any plans to hire now or in the future, get in touch with her so she can start game planning how to help.

• Have had ~3,000 new subscribers to the newsletter through boosts. We use beehiiv to run this newsletter, and a few months ago, their team launched a feature called ‘boosts’ that allows other newsletter writers to recommend other publications. We have taken advantage of this, and it has resulted in thousands of new, high-quality subscribers. We‘ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: if you’re not writing your newsletter on beehiiv, you’re doing your newsletter a disservice.

  

• Four new sections added for premium members. We keep doubling down on the member experience, and we added four new resources for paying members (LP data room template, VC chatbots, venture capital financing trends, and investment frameworks from legendary investors).

• New earn section for us to pay subscribers to become affiliates. We like giving credit where credit is due, and building an affiliate program is an easy way to do that. Premium community members can now earn income by recommending other investors into Confluence (see how here). Anybody can become an affiliate of our digital products and earn 40% of whatever business they bring in.

• Passed 8k website visitors for the month. For those who have been following these updates for a while now, you know how much of an emphasis this has been for us. We have invested a huge amount of effort and resources into making our website more of an authority site, and we are starting to see some dividends from that work.

• Started hiring for a social media manager. We think we are leaving money on the table by not being active on all of the major platforms. This person will help us start to attack that problem by expanding our Twitter presence through relevant memes and witty commentary. This is a part-time role for somebody who loves venture, memes, and making content. If that’s you, apply here.

LOSSES

• We’re abandoning Google Ads (for now). We’ve tested out Google Ads for the past six months, and we have had mixed results. We have decided to put things on pause for now mainly because we would rather allocate these ad dollars to more effective channels (Twitter + beehiiv).

• We’re still waiting on payment for a placement we made on the talent side. We made a placement for a group over the summer that we are still waiting on payment for. We won’t publicly oust who that fund was, but it’s frustrating when you get burned like that. The main lesson we are taking away from this is to remove the ‘no retainer’ agreement within our service agreement in order to get more buy-in from both sides before we start doing any work.

MEDIA

Most popular:

From the blog:

16 Lessons from Brad Feld (Partner @ Foundry Group)

15 Lessons from Brian Singerman (Partner @ Founders Fund)

14 Lessons From Bob Kagle (General Partner @ Benchmark)

Resources:

👨‍💻 Virtual family offices: Deep dive on wealthy FOs are operating virtually

🤑 A Few Laws to Getting Rich: Morgan Housel’s latest piece

💰 Assets by wealth tier: Most valuable assets by wealth class

🛠 20 tips to upgrade sleepy businesses: Tactical ways to improve “boring” businesses

📺 21st-century media platforms: Plus how to build one from scratch

🐎 Trojan Horses to Avoid: Seven things to avoid to stay ahead

💰 Thoughts on Money: 11 thoughts to help you see money for what it is

🤑 Turn Subscribers to Customers: Eight ways to turn emails into $$$

🤷‍♂️ What Do VCs Do?: Deep dive on how things have changed over the past 40 years in VC

🧠 Scaling an Email to 100k: Hard-earned advice from The Generalist

📢 HARDCAP: A new way for fund managers to get in front of LPs

🎧 Focused thoughts: 9 quotes from James Clear on focus

📺 Advertising masterclass: 10 thoughts from David Oglivy

📈 Newsletter subscriber growth 101: How to hit 10k subscribers in under a year

🔎 ChatGPT site review: How to have ChatGPT analyze your site and give you recs to improve

📊 Best paid channels for newsletters: Ranking the options for writers

ASKS

Do you know portfolio companies looking for new growth channels?

We are working with select companies to sponsor this newsletter.

We can only work with companies that have an offer relevant to investors or founders at venture-backed companies (ideally Seed - Series B), and we have helped previous sponsors earn thousands of impressions and clicks to their offers.

If you know anybody, send them our sponsorship page.

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.