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Big headline is that Braintrust is finally available on a fast/cheap blockchain: Base, supporting both their public bridge + fiat on/off ramp from Coinbase.com. Read the blog post for Why Base.
Why it matters:
- Easy access to purchasing BTRST will allow the 685,000+ professionals in the Professional Network to earn for providing 1:1 mentorship sessions and valuable advice in addition to offering free help. BTRST purchases on the Professional Network via Coinbase Pay should be live in the next few weeks.
- Enhance referral engine engagement: the current referral engine has been almost entirely off-chain until someone withdraws to mainnet (< 10% do). Being on a fast and cheap L2 allows for far greater experimentation with dynamic and composable/embeddable upgrades to the referral algo.
- Gamification with a liquid token. Gamification is a well-known tactic that allows sites to use points or other digital credits to incentivize behavior. What if you mixed the best gamification techniques with a liquid token that can be transferred, bought, and sold easily and cheaply? We’re about to find out.
- Transparency around how many BTRST token holders there are and how much network activity there is; prior to this, nearly all activity was off-chain. This will allow the community to build on-chain analytics and dashboards.
AI Matching milestone: We have our first month and a half of data from AI Matching under our belt, and it is quickly proving to be the “secret weapon” we hoped it to be. In just over one month with this AI in place, the average time to fill a job went from 17.5 to 12 days. This is nothing short of remarkable, considering if you ask most of our clients it typically takes 3-5 months to fill a job (outside of Braintrust). Furthermore, great/good matches (as determined by our AI) account for 78% of fills. This means if you have 20 good/great matches, you are extremely likely to fill the job (thus far). For those of you who know the famous Facebook example, this is our “7 friends in 10 days” moment. And it’s only getting better with more usage / tuning.
And now, on to our business updates:
Macro Trends: The market hasn’t changed much since the beginning of the year; still lots of layoffs, reorgs, and business plans in flux, but pockets of opportunity exist. It’s competitive out there for sure, but we’re winning by undercutting other platforms and agencies on price, particularly at a time when everyone is looking hard at costs. We’re also seeing success supporting smaller agencies who need precisely the type of flexible workforce Braintrust offers, with the ability to staff up quickly when they win work.
Sales: 104% to GSV target ($6.5M) with a gap to goal on GCV ($4.7M vs $5.2 target) largely attributed to the short month (Feb), and some below average GCV fills. We’ve grown our sales team significantly to help drive new business, and they are ramping quickly, so we fully expect to make this up in March.
Marketing: We’re putting a lot of focus on our top of the funnel; how leads are generated and converted, so that when we hit the market with our new product features, and hiring picks back up we’ll be able to fully capitalize on the increased demand. We’re also hitting the road for a few leading staffing and innovations conferences and industry events in the coming months in an effort to build our brand presence and visibility.
PR: Some nice recognition by Forbes for the second year in a row as one of America's Best Start Up Employers. We’ve re-engaged our PR firm and are going to be ramping back up the PR over the next few months so more to come here.
Product: We have a full roadmap of pretty dramatic improvements and enhancements coming to the platform over the next few months. Coming up next are ATS system integrations, so customers can sync their internal databases and post jobs more seamlessly, and automated talent screening, making it easier for talent to sign up and be verified on the platform.
Talent: We had another record breaking month on the talent side of the house, achieving our biggest single talent signup month once again, with over 58K signups to the platform (a 4K increase MoM). With our talent community now topping 685,000 people around the globe, and with the Coinbase Base migration complete, we’re ready to finally start capitalizing on the p2p BTRST token features that have tested quite well and introduce many new compelling use cases for BTRST.
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