📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: September 2023 Update

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Good morning 👋

Clay here.

I’m back in Austin for the first time in a month. It feels like a different world after spending the past 30 days in NYC.

I’ll be here the next week then back in the city for the rest of the fall. If you’re in either city when I’m there, shoot me a note.

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

What went right

• Hired Raegan to run our talent business. When you compare us to other venture recruiters (here’s a list), none of the others have a talent base like the investors in Confluence. We think this should be a bigger part of our business, but we haven’t had the time to dedicate to it. So we brought in Raegan to run it. She comes in with years of experience filling hard-to-place roles, and we’re pumped to have her join. If you work in venture and have any plans of hiring now or in the future, find some time with her and see where she can help.

• Nearing 200 candidates in our talent collective. We’ve been running the talent collective for ~two years, and we’ve slowly built up the number of people applying to join. Every candidate in this talent pool comes with venture experience, and businesses can filter the types of candidates they want to meet with then request to chat with any of them. If you’re looking for venture talent, you can join the collective by following this link.

• Created four new free lead magnets to give more value before asking for anything in return. We got started with lead magnets, but somewhere along the way, we stopped doing this. We think that was a mistake, so we’ve re-invested in giving away some of our best stuff for free.

  • VC Tech Stack: 88 tools used by tier one VC

  • Investment Memo Template: our boilerplate template for memos

  • Venture Media List: 132 people and places to learn the game

  • ChatGPT Prompts: prompts to give VCs more leverage

  • Diligence Question Bank: 84 questions to ask founders

• Created three ways for Confluence members to earn as affiliates. Making money is cool, and we think communities that win over the long-term will be the ones that give their members more ways to earn. The primary goal of our community is to help investors play long-term games with the right types of other investors. Earning through affiliate commissions is a way for members to earn extra income while they wait for other bets to pay off. If you’re a reader of this newsletter, you can earn by being an affiliate of the Community Builder Playbook (linked here) or the VC Resource Library (linked here). If you’re a member, log into your membership to see how to get your different affiliate links.

• Fixed Google Ads account. One lesson we’ve learned from running Google Ads? They’re confusing. About a month ago, our account stopped running, and we’ve spent a month going back and forth to figure out what’s going on (spoiler: they weren’t helpful). We abandoned the old campaign, started a new one, and we’re humming again. Still a work-in-progress, so stay tuned.

• Cleaned community homepage to mirror brand guidelines. Our old community page was limited in its design. Our hosting provider recently upgraded their features, and it allowed us to redesign the look and feel to match what we wanted. Give it a look and let us know what you think.

• Boosts is unlocking faster newsletter growth. We’ve talked about beehiiv before, and we use it to power this newsletter. It’s arguably the best piece of software we use, and Boosts is a feature from their team to grow subscribers by letting other beehiiv writers recommend readers to your subscribers. We’ve tested a ton of channels to figure out the best way to acquire newsletter subscribers; Boosts is the winner, and we’re pouring our marketing budget into it.

• We’re building a free masterclass on how to run SPVs. If you want to be the first to know when this goes live, let us know.

What went wrong

• New community design = problem in new places. Re-designing the community homepage created some bumps in the road, and we got some good feedback from other members on things we should fix. Short term hurdles.

• Missed a week of newsletter posts. My calendar in the middle of September is nightmare fuel. I missed a week of posts while I dealt with other fires.

• Have not figured out affiliate model for premium memberships yet. We’ve dipped our toes into how to run an affiliate program for premium memberships. It’s a bit easier when you have permissionless selling (like our other digital products); it becomes a bit harder when there is an application process involved in the affiliate product. We’re solving it and will share with more members soon.

Media

Most popular:

📶 how some VCs are winning higher ownership positions

📶 Breaking down the latest YC batch

📶 Summer reading: The best startup + venture content I read over the summer

From the blog:

How I Stay Up-to-Date With Trends

How to Build a VC Ecosystem

Four Reasons VCs Obsess Over Trends

How to Do Good Due Diligence

Why Good VCs Spend the Most Time on Diligence

Most-clicked resources:

✉️ 500k: Lessons from building a 500k person email list

🗣 11 Marketing Channels That Work: Where to spend your time finding customers

🥱 130 Boring Businesses: Non-sexy places to invest your money

🤖 AI Agents: Breakdown of the best AI agents

🤔 Logical Fallacies: Eight common examples of flawed thinking

✅ How to Win Your First 10 B2B Customers: How some of the best companies have done it

🔮 In Service of Founders: David Senra explains his passion for understanding the best founders in history

🔮 ONCE: The 37signals guys have written a manifesto for a new relationship with software

📈 Amazon’s ad business, explained: Great breakdown of Amazon’s $43b ad business

💭 A Dozen Things I’ve Learned From Don Valentine: Timeless wisdom from one of the GOATs

👉 Reflections on operator-investors: Why you have to have lived in an entrepreneurs’ shoes to understand their situation

🕹 10 thoughts on the video game industry: George Mack gives his two cents

📺 Making Media: One of the best podcasts we’ve found on building and growing a media empire

Asks

1) Are you working at a venture or growth equity fund?

2) Are you hiring now or in the future?

If you can answer yes to both of those, you should meet with Raegan on our team. She’s here to learn about where we can help.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk.

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