Growth Report 7: Community Leads the Way to Improving Braintrust.

💡 The WYSC (why you should care).

Braintrust is user-owned and user-controlled. And this week, the Core Team put that ethos into action when they took direction from the Community and shifted focus to build the documentation and support that is most needed. The Community talks, and the Core Team listens.

⏳ The TL;DR.

• Five9, Intel, and IBM are just a few exciting companies hiring on Braintrust right now!
• Just launched: a client story about how Nestlé Purina beat the competition to market AND saved $310,000 in agency fees with Braintrust
• Talent in the Braintrust community are helping other Talent improve their profiles to get hired (Community is EVERYTHING)
• Braintrust is implementing a content management system to improve and expand support articles and other helpful content
• The Core Team takes direction from the Community on ways to improve the Talent referral program

🧠 Braintrust Core Team Job Opportunities.

• Braintrust is looking for multiple Technical Sourcers! Help find the perfect person to get hired and earn a $500 cash reward for your referral - share this link.
• Unicorns are hard to find. So are UI/UX Managerial Designers. Know someone who might be interested in this role? Here’s the link.

👨‍💻 Network Updates.

A word from CEO & Co-Founder Adam Jackson:

“Crypto is extremely volatile - get used to it. The price of a token has ZERO correlation with the value or utility of a network. (DOGE, anyone?!) Don’t let price spikes get you too happy or big rips down ruin your day. We’ve built Braintrust to take value once extracted by middlemen (marketplace operators) and give it back to the users - price has no effect on that equation!”

💸 Sales Updates.

Saying yes is easy. But the Braintrust Sales team is not about easy - they’re about quality. That’s why a big focus for them has been on being more selective with which jobs they post to the platform. Not every job that a customer wants to fill is the perfect fit, and the goal of this selection process is twofold:

1. Set customers up for success by only agreeing to post the kinds of jobs that suit the skills of the Talent in the network
2. Set Talent up for success by posting the kinds of jobs they actually want to work on

🦄Talent Updates.

Aside from surpassing these ^ numbers from last week, the Talent team’s goals this week are:

• Secure 10+ Talent Sourcer candidates and host interviews. (Know someone who might be interested? Help find the perfect person to get hired and earn a $500 cash reward for your referral! Here’s the link.)
• Prepare to launch the new Talent reporting dashboard on May 31! Hooray, reporting!

📝 Marketing Updates.

Braintrust launched the first-ever (official) client story on Nestlé! It’s got everything you could ever want in a story - a hero, a race against the competition, $310,000 in savings, actionable tips for success, animations, cute dog pics, a happy ending. Click here to see it.

A peek at the Nestlé client story.

Even more content for you:

• Blog: The Best Video Interview Set Ups
• Blog: 6 Macro Trends Hitting Enterprise, Work, & Talent, Courtesy of Harvard Business School

Other priorities for the week:

• Talent marketing, as always (Interested in joining Braintrust? Apply here today - Talent are making an average of $99 an hour - and rising! - for projects on Braintrust!)

👪 Community Updates.

Last week, Community was focused on finding and asking Talent with excellent Braintrust profiles for their approval to share with others. The goal was to provide helpful examples for others to learn from and improve their own profiles.

And this week, they delivered! Click on these 2 images to check out these awesome Talent profiles:

Other areas of focus for the Community team this week:

• Finding ways to encourage more members of the Community to engage in Slack
  • Spoiler alert: The team is scoping moving the Community to Discord. More to come on this below....
• Trying a new tactic for the next Monthly Community All-Hands next week: This time, they’re crowdsourcing the agenda from the community itself to tailor the updates to what the actual owners of Braintrust want to hear (instead of a department-by-department update like the one you’re reading right now)
• Continued Talent sourcing via dev forums

🏛️ Infrastructure Updates.

Turns out the Braintrust Community has a LOT of questions that aren’t answered on this page…. Or on any other page.

Community has been asking a LOT of questions. Infrastructure is about to automatically answer (almost) all of them. How? They’ve selected a content management system called Wagtail to quickly create, deploy, and update Braintrust support content. This means less manual work for them!

But why should you care? Because:

• Information about Braintrust is about to become easily discoverable and accessible
• Braintrust Talent and Clients will be able to solve 80% of issues instantly just by having access to these resources. No more waiting around for a Core Team member to help you with simple problems!
• Being happy that another person’s job just got easier is good for the soul

And with that huge accomplishment, Infra can shift focus to other big-ticket items like:

• The talk of the town right now is the migration of the Community Slack over to Discord. Yes, it’s a big deal. Yes, there’s more info to come on this - stay tuned!

💻 Product Updates.

A look at the designs for some in-product referral cards.

When Product started revamping the referral engine, they wanted to go beyond just improving the referral copy and design. So they interviewed Community members to learn why they do - or don’t - refer, and discovered:

• People do refer because they authentically want to help other people, they like the Braintrust model, and they want to refer specific people to specific jobs. (This is all good!)
• People don’t refer because they don’t understand what BTRST is or they don’t think the incentive system is clear. (This means there is more work to do.)

So on top of building education for those “don’t” points, Product is focusing on:

• Improving Talent comms
• Kicking off product analytics
• Hiring: Know a UX/UI designer? Refer them to join the Braintrust Core Team

👤 HR + Culture Updates.

On top of onboarding a new member of the Sales team, priorities for HR + Culture this week include:

• Continued work on sourcing more Sourcers (10, to be exact). Know someone who might be interested in working with Braintrust to find and invite more new amazing Talent to join? Share this link
• Building upon existing culture documentation
• Preparing for onboarding 3 new hires starting in early June
• Planning fun Core Team bonding activities!

Speaking of fun activities… when the Co-Founder and CRO says it’s happy hour, it’s happy hour.

🚩 Weekly challenges and red flags.

• Not all growth is good growth. To scale this network efficiently, the team needs to be hyper-focused on growing in core verticals or else risk spreading the network too thin. That means being selective about which jobs clients can post, and which types of Talent the team can focus on sourcing.
  
  • That’s not to say these things won’t expand to new verticals in the future, it just means the team has to serve the current verticals well before expanding.
• There’s a lot of work happening on the Product & Infrastructure side, and a lot to be done before public launch. It’s important to stay focused on the most business-critical projects, and build things for the future, not the now…. Even if it is difficult.