It feels surreal — another 12 months have flown by, and Data Driven VC just turned three. What started as an experiment of writing out loud has now grown into a global community and platform that I could hardly have imagined back then.

Staying true to my “building in public” mantra, I want to continue the series of anniversary posts (see year 1 here and year 2 here) and use this post to reflect on the third year, share the wins and struggles along the way, and open the curtain on what’s next. Expect plenty of learnings, frameworks, and resources you can apply right away — plus some fresh perks and discounts.

.. I will share a detailed behind the scenes look at the evolution of Data Driven VC across our five pillars 1) Newsletters, 2) Reports, 3) Events, 4) Products, and 5) “The Lab”, and highlight what is in for you.

Let’s dive in!

Today marks the 343rd edition, split across 1 monthly wrap-up and 3 weekly formats:

These formats cover a broad spectrum of topics relevant to private market investors, LPs, founders & operators interested in AI, automation, and data-driven innovation.

I initially started writing via Medium, the go-to publishing platform in 2018.

As I learned more about platform dependency and the importance of owning the direct relationship to my audience, I moved to Substack in September 2022. Substack was the perfect platform for authors and creators as it was free, intuitive, allowed me to collect email addresses, and publish my content with ease.

Having raised close to $100M until 2021 from the likes of YC and a16z, Substack added more and more features. The initial pace of innovation was crazy. To my surprise, however, most new features were closer to social platforms than to what you’d expect from a creator platform. Video, podcast, chat, threads - and last but not least the “follow” button. Suddenly, what started as a platform for authors and creators has secretly become a social network.

To show you what that means, let’s look at the graph below. Between the start of DDVC in September 2022 and spring 2024, my newsletter has nicely grown from zero to 25k readers with an average of 1k+ net new subs per month. If I’d decided to leave the platform, I could’ve easily taken all my readers with me. So far, so good.

Now comes the interesting part: End of 2023, Substack introduced the “follow” button in their app and slowly but gradually started to push it throughout 2024. By July 2024, I noticed for the first time that my email subscriber growth started slowing down and when looking trough the limited analytics available in Substack, I found another new graph called “followers”. While followers grew at the previous rate of 1k+ per month and reached 28k by the time, my email subs were only at 27k. A gap of 1k that didn’t exist before. Put into context, one month lost in email subscribers.

Fast forward to today, Substack followers of DDVC have reached 52k - which is truly amazing. However, the email subs continued to slow down and only reached 35k. The gap of 1k increased to 17k within a year. For context: That’s one year of growth lost.

For an author who wants to own the direct relationship to his audience, this is a no go. The initial reason I left Medium was to own the relationship and reduce platform dependency. Unfortunately, Substack did not live up to this expectation. Instead, they started routing more and more of my readers to their app and converted them into followers and app users rather than making them loyal email subscribers of my publication.

While getting increasingly frustrated with Substack, I saw Beehive as an alternative arising. Not only do they allow authors to own the relationship to their readers end-to-end, but it also has significantly more analytics, APIs, automations - everything a writer wants.

I first tested it end of 2024, but was honestly afraid of migrating. What if I lose my subs and the mapping doesn’t work? What if SEO dies? What if…? Many reasons to not move, but after almost two years of pain, it was just too much frustration and I pulled the trigger. Also, thanks to a push by my friend CJ from Mostly Metrics who did the move just weeks ago.

Last week, I took all my email subscribers and migrated the DDVC newsletter from Substack to Beehive and… well, it worked perfectly. The only question I have: Why didn’t I do it earlier?

In May this year, we launched the third edition of the Data Driven VC Landscape, covering unique survey data from 300+ participants about 235 firms, their tech stacks, budgets, teams, and more.

For the first time, we’ve dedicated a full section to AI, agents, most frequently used LLMs, a prompt library, a deep dive about how to build a VC copilot, and more.

We’ll launch the survey for the 2026 edition by the end of this year. Stay tuned!

In the past year, we hosted:

Over the years, we’ve bought, built, and tested hundreds of tools; created dozens of templates, lists, and prompt libraries; set up automations and developed copilots. Unsurprisingly, we made the same mistakes and learned the same lessons. But what if we could learn more from each other? What if all best practices, tips & tricks would be available to the community?

In the spirit of open source, I decided to share my own resources and add whatever useful I could find online. Over the course of the last year, we launched limitedpartnerlist.com and venturecapitaldata.com, and recently added the largest directory of resources for private market investors via vcstack.com. You can access all items individually via the page or all together via out platform The Lab.

With all of these new projects, I also decided to streamline the touch & feel and worked with Max and his exceptional team at Magier to create the new DDVC brand and relaunch our website datadrivenvc.io

Last year around this time, we noticed that the DDVC universe has grown so much, that it became increasingly complex to discover all our resources and find what you are actually looking for. This is why we launched The Lab as a single place where you can find everything you need to run a modern investment firm. Today, we have 150+ members of The Lab and we’ll launch some big new projects soon. So stay tuned and join the community to not miss out.

Year one was about starting the newsletter and spotting adjacent opportunities to create even more value for our growing community. The DDVC Landscape was the first step on this journey.

Year two was about expansion and launching further initiatives. We added “Insights” and “Picks” to the newsletter, launched the second edition of the DDVC Landscape as well as the database benchmarking report, hosted the first virtual Summit, created “The Lab” as a hub for our community, and developed our first products including the “VC Tool Finder”.

Year three was about doubling down on what worked well, cutting what didn’t, and setting DDVC up for future success and scale. That meant rebuilding the foundation, adopting new tools, creating automations, best practices, documentation, and more. As many of you have asked about the tech stack behind DDVC, I’m happy to share the top 25 tools and infra we use to run our platform:

The list goes on but above tools are the superpowers that allow me to produce high quality output with minimum input.

Now that DDVC has clear PMF and a robust foundation, year four will be all about scaling the impact we have on our community of private market investors. Hit reply if you wish to see other formats or want to work with us.

Last but not least, I can’t miss the opportunity to say THANK YOU to everyone who has helped our community grow to reach this point. 

Big shoutout to our growing family of contributors including Georgiy, Jerome, Christopher, my event co-host Felix, the Bits & Pretzels team around Max, Lena, Ann-Kathrin, Christian, as well as the numerous speakers, and all the amazing partners and sponsors I’ve had the pleasure to work with! There is definitely more to come …

… and as French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal already said: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"👋🏻

Stay driven,
Andre