📶 Software cheat codes

Confluence.VC is the operating playbook for venture and growth equity investors. Since launching, membership has grown to include:

1,719 members 👥 from 1,214 unique funds 💸 across 151 different cities 🌎 

Want to get more involved?

Join 👥 | Invest with us 📶 | Hire better 📌 | Become a paying subscriber 💸 

Investment news:

We have a Series A gaming syndicate deal that’s closing soon. TL;DR on why we like it:

📈$1.5mm revenue in year one. They’ve generated this in twelve months, and they’re on pace for $7.8mm by EOY 2022.

👥 Elite team. Co-founders have done it before, and they held executive positions at FaZe Clan prior to starting XSET.

📶 Growing market. 81% of Gen Z games, and the market is already worth $175 billion worldwide. We expect this to only increase as younger generations spend more time in front of screens.

Access deal page here.

Coding is overrated, and I missed my window to become a great developer. That said, I like building stuff, and I didn’t want to let my inability to program stop me from doing that.

We’ve built our business without writing any code, and it’s very easy for other non-technical people to do the same. This is a breakdown of the software we use to run Confluence along with a cost breakdown of each aspect. 

If you’re in the market for new software and want to save some money, you should check out our perk board.

Website: Squarespace ($23 / month)

Total monthly cost = $23

• Squarespace made it easy to secure a domain and get started by creating a landing page. They provide templates to help you get started, a logo maker, marketing tools, and you can monitor site analytics (unique visitors, pageviews, referral sources, etc.) to get deeper insights on your visitors. Our site has evolved a bit since we launched, and we have used their partner marketplace to get matched with Squarespace experts to grow our site as we have expanded our offerings.

Community: Notion (free) + Super ($12 / month) + Memberspace ($50 / month) + Airtable ($20 / month)+ Slack (free) + Builtfirst (free)

Total monthly cost = $72

• We built our resource library using Notion, and we have embedded our Slack login, Airtable member directory, and Builtfirst perk board into different pages within the Notion workspace. When we converted over to a paid community in October, we migrated over to Super and we gated access using Memberspace. This is the article we followed to make that transition happen.

Content: Calendly ($8 / month) + Zoom ($16 / month) + Descript ($30 / month) + Anchor (free) + Headliner ($26 / month) + Figma (free) Substack (free) / beehiiv ($29 / month)

Total monthly cost = $109

• This is surprisingly our most-expensive spending category. We hate scheduling meetings, and Calendly helps automate the back and forth. We record all podcasts using Zoom, export the audio file, and we use Descript to clean it up (manually removing word gaps and filler words is a nightmare, and this is worth the cost). Anchor hosts all of the podcast audio which makes it easy to recycle intros and outros, and Headliner creates audiographs that are automatically uploaded to our YouTube channel to help with discovery. Figma is great for making visuals, and we use it for our logo and designs within the newsletter. We used to use Substack to host the newsletter, but we switched over to beehiiv last month because the product is better, and it better fit our needs.

Operations: Stripe (free - takes % of each transaction) + Mercury (free) + Gusto ($6 / month) + Sprig (free) + Fiverr (pay by project) + Zapier ($59 / month) + Visible (free) + Google Sheets (free)

Total monthly cost = $65

• Running the operations of a business is easier than people make it out to be. When you start collecting payments, Stripe is a no-brainer; we also used Stripe Atlas to incorporate our business, and I would recommend that anybody else looking to start a business do the same. Mercury is still considered a newer bank, but their product is 10x better and easier to use compared to the incumbents. We’ve written more on how to get started with Mercury here. We use Gusto for payroll, and it’s made it simple to pay contractors on time. We use Sprig for microsurveys (you might have seen them nested within the bottom of our newsletter), and they are great for getting customer feedback. We’ve written before about how we use Fiverr and why more people should be outsourcing non-critical tasks, and we’ve gotten a lot better at this. We keep all of our financial metrics in Google Sheets, but I’m realizing it might be time to switch over to Quickbooks. Visible helps us send out monthly recaps of our business and organize all of our data into one centralized source so we can show dashboards around the things that matter. Tying these different pieces of software together with logic is critical for us (or any other small team), and we’ve become experts at using Zapier. It’s the best software purchase we make, and it can end up saving you weeks of manual work through the course of a year.

Monetization: Podia ($89 / month) + Pallet (free) + AngelList (free)

Total cost = $89

• We’ve written about monetizing communities in the past, so we’ll be brief here. We’re continually adding offers so that we can monetize in different ways. Podia let’s us monetize on our knowledge through courses (check out the Community Builder Playbook if you want to follow the steps we took to create a digital opportunity generator). Pallet let’s us monetize on the talent within the Confluence community. Job posters can either post directly to the board (somewhat transactional where we promote their job for 60 days), or they can sign up for our talent collectivewhere they get deeper levels of access into who is looking to make a move. Both of these options provide cash flow which helps us run our business. AngelList let’s us think more long-term by allowing us to run our syndicate and invest into other businesses. They make this process easy, and you can tap into their LP base to get more capital. For anybody that is looking to spin up smaller SPV checks, I’d recommend checking out Assure or Sydecar.

Featured jobs:

Join our talent collective if you want to get access to 100+ vetted investors that are looking for new roles. The first month is free using the code 'FREEPERIOD'.

• Playground Global is looking for an investment associate in Palo Alto

• Liberty Mutual Ventures is looking for an analyst in Boston

• Hitachi Ventures is looking for an analyst in Boston

• Chamaeleon is looking for a remote associate (based in EU

• Pallet is looking for a BD & sales rep in NYC

• BBG Ventures is looking for an MBA associate in NYC

Learning:

If you’re looking to become a master in building community…

The Community Builder Playbook walks through the steps we took to create a profitable online community.  

Building an online community has leveled up my life over the past two years, and I want to share that knowledge so you can do the same.This playbook includes 23 lessons on:

• Creating a community from scratch

• Convincing people to join

• Scaling the right way

• Monetizing your work

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