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Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a restful holiday break.
Even with the expected slowing in hiring due to the end-of-year holidays, we still managed to increase GCV ($4.5M, +16% MoM) and remained relatively flat on GSV ($6.6M, -2% MoM) We continue to see bright spots in AI, with several large AI clients accounting for $1.2M of our December GCV.
The good news is we’re already seeing the sales funnel ramping back up, with reps taking a record number of meetings each day – primarily with existing customers – planning for 2024. The feedback is very clear: Braintrust is their go-to talent partner if and when they are hiring, but budgets are still very much in limbo as companies try to navigate out of this enterprise recession.
Because of the work we’ve done automating manual processes, we’ve made the enterprise sales motion very profitable. So, it's time to ramp up on offense by adding five new enterprise reps to help ensure we capture a disproportionate market share as the space rebound.
ASK: We’re looking for the very best (top 5% of performers) B2B/SaaS salespeople out there. If you know someone who would be great, please connect them with me directly.
Now, on to our own automation efforts and other network updates….
Initiatives to drive automation and efficiency:
Automated Matching: Our new AI Matching Engine, launched publicly today, instantly matches clients with the best talent for their roles. The AI Engine – which was trained with 4+ years of proprietary platform data and extensive RLFH (reinforcement learning from human feedback) by top-performing human recruiters – performs at a 90% accuracy rate and is expected to dramatically reduce the amount of manpower and time required to hire while improving the quality of the match (likelihood of success in the role). This is a new level of service that wasn’t possible even a year ago, thanks to our proprietary AI systems.
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.
BTRST Token engagement: Our unique competitive advantage is the BTRST token. While we’ve been able to leverage it meaningfully for customer and talent referrals, we believe there is even more magic to unlock here. We’re hiring for a PM to help us accelerate these growth experiments - please send any referrals to the application page linked here.
Client (demand) side performance:
GCV/ GSV: Overall, we’re on track this quarter, QTD 65% vs. budget (69% of budget on GSV), thanks to strong performance from AI fills, which accounted for $1.6M QTD, or 19% of the QTD GCV.
New Clients: The area(s) where we’re pacing behind are new clients - both posting jobs and invoicing through the platform. This is a primary focus for ‘24 and a key reason we’re adding additional sales reps, as mentioned above, to ensure we’re grabbing as much land as possible.
MBO Partners: This month we kicked off a partnership to help staff enterprise accounts through global sourcing platform MBO, hoping to replicate the success we’ve seen through with our partnership with payroll provider Deel. In our first week live, we are already getting jobs from Booz Allen, HP, and Weaver with over $1M in active pipeline. More to come!
Website: A lot of clients didn’t realize our full breadth of services so we launched two new pages: Solutions, Skills & Capabilities, and did a refresh to our Case Studies page in an effort to help customers understand the breadth and depth of our offerings and showcase success stories.
Talent (supply) side performance:
Talent: Our talent base is healthy and strong, with 571,877 talent members, and continuing to grow rapidly, largely due to continued tech layoffs. This side of the marketplace continues to grow exponentially with $0 CAC.
Professional Network: We’re preparing to launch Braintrust Spaces, focused communities within the Professional Network that will enable talent to seek more targeted help along their career journey. We will start with Braintrust-led Spaces that are most in-demand: (1) Connectors, (2) Resume reviews, and (3) Professionals looking for work and expand to additional topics based on talent interest.
Token: BTRST was recently added to Base’s public bridge (Coinbase’s L2), and after extensive testing, we’re finally beginning to migrate tens of thousands of non-zero BTRST wallets to the new blockchain. This will enable all token transfers + BTRST users to be viewed on-chain, including the vibrant referral engine + all the new p2p use cases we’re testing on the Professional Network (hence the new PM hire above). Coinbase Pay integration (coming very soon) will allow talent to buy BTRST directly in the Braintrust application (without having to go to Coinbase) to spend on career help, token-gated content, continuing education, events and much more.
How can you help?
- Intros to prospective clients that want to leverage cutting-edge AI to save hundreds of recruiting hours
- Intros to prospective sales reps who want to be on the leading edge of AI + blockchain
If you have connections for either, please email me directly.
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