📣New Newsletter Format Coming Soon
"Resources" includes Picks, Multiples, Prompts & More
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data-Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. Join 32,970 thought leaders from VCs like a16z, Accel, Index, Sequoia, and more to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
Hi there!
Throughout the past 2.5 years, Data Driven VC has evolved from a weekly newsletter about “how to become a better investor with data & AI” into a comprehensive platform where you can find everything to run a modern investment firm.
The newsletter with its three formats Essays (how to become more data-driven), Insights (research & reports), and Picks (trending startups) attracts more than thousand new subscribers per month and has just crossed 350k monthly reads, putting us on track to surpass 5M annual views in 2025.
For many of you, the newsletter serves as the first touchpoint before you somehow explore our other resources and get deeper involved in the DDVC community. It serves as the classic top of funnel.
Yet, we’ve learned from our regular reader surveys that the majority of new subscribers (and oftentimes even longterm existing readers) remain unaware for too long about what’s available beyond the top of funnel newsletter. I’m talking about our resource library that includes:
Virtual & Physical Events (+ recordings)
VC Tool Finder & Discounts
Database Benchmarking
AI Copilots & GPTs
Automation Templates
Document Templates
Fundraising Materials
Browser Plugins
Contact Lists
…
The list of resources keeps growing and you can individually pick what you need via our website or get unlimited access to all of them via The Lab.
While your feedback on the various resources is exceptional, we learned that we need to make the resource discovery and the transition from the newsletter to the DDVC ecosystem more natural and fluid. To reduce the time to value, we’re excited to launch a range of new initiatives over the course of the next weeks & months.
📣New Sunday newsletter format to discover our resources more easily
Today, I’m excited to share that as the first initiative, we’ll advance our Sunday newsletter format. “Picks” becomes “Resources”.
We initially added the Sunday format as the third free weekly newsletter stream in July last year with “Picks” as its theme. The idea behind “Picks” was to showcase how data-driven startup scoring can provide immediate value, exemplified by a list of 10 hot stealth, early, and growth-stage startups selected based on a broad set of growth signals.
From the reader surveys, we’ve learned that a) the weekly frequency was too high, b) we need to include a broader set of companies to make it more relevant for the diverse interests of our readers, and c) you want an easier to understand and more consistent scoring metric.
You speak, we listen!
“Resources” format 1 of 4: “Picks of the month”
Starting next week, we’ll transition from weekly to monthly “Picks” and include a selection of 30 hot startups (10x in stealth, 10x in early-stage with less than $10M in funding, and 10x in growth-stage with more than $10M in funding) based on investor interest on our partner’s platform, measured by the number of investor visits per startup profile.
Tripling the number of opportunities per episode increases the relevance for a broader set of investors while focusing on investor interest as sole metric for selection perfectly presents the hottest opportunities in the market.
In turn, the reduced frequency of “Picks” frees up three monthly slots in our Sunday format that we’ll fill with complementary formats, driving a more natural discovery of the additional resources available in our DDVC ecosystem.
“Resources” format 2 of 4: “Multiples”
While we’ve focused most of the newsletter episodes on successful startups, how we can identify, analyze, and score them, what we can learn from outliers, and more, we’ll add “the market” view as a new dimension.
More specifically, we’ve selected a partner to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date public & private market metrics across growth rates, revenue multiples, operating & FCF margins, and more. EV/NTM for hyper scalers? We got you covered. SaaS vs AI application layer margins? We got you covered.
This format will digest monthly market movements into a single episode.
“Resources” format 3 of 4: “Prompts”
We’re data-driven. Not only for investments, but also for this newsletter. Looking at the 267 articles from the past, among the most read, liked, and shared are the most tangible ones like “LinkedIn meets ChatGPT”, “Building a personalized events database without coding skills” or “Startup evaluation with ChatGPT”.
Their common denominator? All of them include easy to implement scripts & prompts. To give you more of what you love, the third “Resources” format of each month will be “Prompts” where we share the most powerful instructions for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & more powering our community’s daily workflows.
“Resources” format 4 of 4: “VC Stack”
For the remaining Sunday of each month, we’ll share a snapshot from our growing resource library to give you a glimpse of what’s available in our DDVC ecosystem. If you like what you see, you might want to checkout The Lab to get unlimited access to all our resources.
Conclusion
Starting today, our Sunday format changes from “Picks” to “Resources” as we’ll keep what you like but expand the scope to share even more valuable resources. While Tuesday Insights and Thursday Essays remain free for all subscribers, the Sunday Resources will only be accessible in full for our paid subscribers, same as for our archive of 250+ deep dives.
Here’s a quick summary for various degrees of engagement in our community:
Free newsletter subscribers (Substack): New Tuesday Insights & Thursday Essays
Paid newsletter subscribers (Substack): Same as free subscribers + Sunday Resources + unlimited access to our archive of 250+ articles
The Lab Basic: Same as paid newsletter subscribers + unlimited access to virtual events (live & recordings), curated videos & podcasts, reports & more
The Lab Standard: Same as The Lab Basic + access to all our products such as VC Tool Finder, AI Copilots & GPTs, Automation/Document/Notion Templates, Browser Plugins, Contact Lists & more
The Lab VIP: Same as The Lab Standard + access to our VIP community (limited to 100 seats) including regular get-togethers, tech in vc job board, member-only chats & more
💥Special offer
To celebrate the launch of our new “Sunday Resources” format, we extend a 20% discount for paid newsletter subscriptions until the publication of the first episode next Sunday.
Stay driven,
Andre
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