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We’ve just wrapped up a rollercoaster of a fiscal year on a high note, closing out Q4 125% to GCV target ($16M) & 106% to GSV target ($20.7M). In January – which is typically a slow month for hiring – we had our highest fill month ever, a 200%+ increase in new clients posting jobs MoM, resulting in a 70% MoM increase in GCV.
These positive signs in the numbers are tempered by the broader economic realities and feedback we’re getting from our sales team on the front lines. The tech layoffs we’ve been seeing for the past three quarters have continued into early 2024, and there is extreme scrutiny over budgets and adding headcount. Customers are asking themselves the right question(s): is this role necessary? Can it be automated by AI?
The AI wave that is slowing overall hiring is thankfully simultaneously juicing the Braintrust funnel, with several large AI clients accounting for $1.6M of our January GCV. We’ve also discovered a major unlock in what we’re calling BYOT (bring your own talent) where customers bring their talent from other staffing platforms to Braintrust to take advantage of our back end infrastructure to manage talent + low fee model. The BYOT offering accounted for almost 20% ($3.5M) of our GCV in the past month, and has brought hundreds of net new, highly skilled talent on to the platform; a win-win, and a strategy we’ll be looking to double down on in the coming months.
We also had a tremendous January on the talent side of the house, achieving our biggest single talent signup month ever, with over 54,651 signups to the platform (a 35% increase MoM). With our talent community now topping 650,000 people around the globe, our focus is on keeping them engaged and active on the platform. On the Professional Network we just launched Spaces where talent can collaborate around shared interests and professional goals, and get introduced to new contract/FT opportunities on the marketplace that they’re well-suited for. As soon as the Coinbase Base migration is complete (imminent) we’ll finally be able to introduce the p2p BTRST token features that have tested quite well and introduce many new compelling use cases for BTRST.
Here’s what we’re focused on in the month ahead:
- Increased Dev Capacity: We’re increasing our engineering capacity so we can ship more, and automate, faster.
- Adding Sales Reps: Thanks for all the referrals after last month’s update. We signed on some real hitters in order to capture disproportionate market share as things come back in 2024.
- Automated Screening: Next up on the AI roadmap is automated talent screening, streamlining this process to make it easier for talent to sign up and be verified with fewer humans and higher accuracy / less bias.
- More New Clients: The new sales reps + new investments in PR, conferences and events to ramp up the top of funnel lead generation.
One thing to watch
Last week I had the pleasure of joining *CMT Digital for a webinar with their LP’s talking about Braintrust and what we’re building; it’s short and sweet (especially if you play it at 2x speed) and is a pretty good primer on what we’re building and why it matters. Link here.
How can you help?
As always, the number one, two and three things you can do to help are making introductions to CTO’s, Digital Innovation Leaders, Hiring Managers, and really anyone who wants to save money and time in their recruiting process.
Number four would be introductions to other prospective Connectors who want to help make intros to those people, and earn BTRST.
As always, please email me directly with introductions to any/all of the above.
Thank you, as always, for your support, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.
All the best,
Adam
Join Braintrust: https://app.usebraintrust.com/r/adam3/
Braintrust dashboard: https://info.braintrust.com
Podcast: www.adamjacksonshow.xyz
*Compliance Note: The CMT Webinar is for informational purposes only. References to any securities, digital assets, tokens, and/or cryptocurrencies are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation to invest in any such instrument nor do such references constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services.