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This past week I traveled to New York to meet with investors, media, etc. While I was in town, I had the opportunity to appear on TD Ameritrade Live from the New York Stock Exchange, and share my thoughts on the economy and more specifically, the labor market and tech sector jobs. TLDR; from where we sit at Braintrust, it appears to be going from bad to worse.
6-8 weeks ago, about half our enterprise clients were on a full hiring freeze. It is now about 75%. The jobs will come back – they always do – but in the meantime, we’re focused on two things for the marketplace business:
- Cutting costs / driving efficiency
- Focus on existing client expansion (and making this more scalable)
What I’ve learned from building marketplace businesses my entire career is that when you’re in downturns like this, you bulk up on the side of the marketplace that’s free (talent for us right now) and build your muscles to be ready for when the demand comes back. For us that means a maniacal focus on customer experience + automated processes in order to be able to exponentially grow revenue without growing opex / headcount.
Braintrust was born in the 2018 crypto winter, and launched publicly in the midst of a global pandemic, and came out the other side of both better and stronger. I have no doubt this cycle will have the same result, except we’ll come out the other side many times larger.
Other initiatives that build our strengths:
Most notably, we’re preparing for the public launch of The Professional Network on Thursday June 8th. This new product offering from Braintrust enables global talent not only to find high-paying jobs on the platform, but also the opportunity to grow their career. With hundreds of thousands of tech workers unemployed, it couldn’t be a better time to launch a platform for networking and career help, and we’re planning a full court press.
I’m also completely obsessed with automation (if you’ve been listening to my podcast, The Adam Jackson Show, you know this) and am personally examining every single manual process in our network and building ways to automate it with AI/ML, and we are running a contest within our talent community offering BTRST rewards for automations that can drive efficiency within the network.
I remain as confident as ever in the efficacy of this new User Owned Network model, and grateful as always for the support of this community.
Any questions, comments, concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
All the best,
Adam
Join Braintrust: https://app.usebraintrust.com/r/adam3/
Braintrust dashboard: https://info.braintrust.com
Podcast: www.adamjacksonshow.xyz