One of the unique advantages of being part of the Braintrust network is that we get to see macro-economic changes in real-time. Good news this month: we’re seeing early signs that the macro climate is improving, and that tech hiring is starting to pick back up. Three months ago, 3/4 of our clients were on a hiring freeze, but we’re now seeing hiring start to ramp back up. The core teams continue to test new ways of stimulating demand while driving efficiencies through automation in order to capture even more market share as the space rebounds from the lows of July/August.
Platform Improvements to increase efficiency & GSV growth:
- Self Serve: The launch of Self Serve resulted in 1000%+ MoM Increase in new qualified client sign-ups (660 new qualified clients) without any marketing or inbound assistance. As expected, the quality of these jobs is mixed, so we’re implementing product adaptations to ensure the posts are verified, and automated triggers to prompt these jobs to be filled faster.
- Automation:Once we get people in the top of the funnel, it’s our job to match them to the right talent as quickly as possible. We’re preparing to release an updated version of our match score algorithm, which ranks talent based on their fit for a role and concisely explains to a customer why a talent would or wouldn’t be a good fit for a job. These features will improve the speed and accuracy of our matching, all driving to increased GCV/GSV without human intervention.
- Professional Network: In August, we hit over 35K Weekly Active Users (site-wide, not just profnet) and introduced a new feed ranking algorithm that resulted in a ~10% improvement in contributions per WAU. BTRST will be introduced as a payment method for specialized, 1:1 mentorship and advice in the next month or so. Coinbase is our partner for purchasing BTRST directly in the application with a credit or debit card. Talent can also now be paid in crypto via our Stripe integration.
Client (demand) side performance:
- Clients: We continue to add new, valuable logos. In August we signed enterprise clients including Accenture, Reddit, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, NetApp, and Ellucian.
- Revenue: Our new GCV increased 29% MoM (leading indicator of GSV) and GSV was down 6% MoM
- Performance: We increased all key metrics MoM; fills (up 48%), job posts (up 17%) - but we’re still trending behind targets - 65% to new GCV goal, 71% to fill goal, and an overall 8% decrease in Freelance GSV attributed to an expiration of some key contacts.
- Partnerships: Drove 33 leads in August, representing a 50% increase over July, and 6 new clients.
Talent (supply) side performance:
- We continue to see record breaking talent sign ups (42,000 in the past month alone), bringing total talent users to over 460k.
- We recently hosted our latest Fireside Chat with Andrew Heywood, a recruiter at Roblox, which received over 1500 RSVPs and 95 questions on the Professional Network feed - the most engagement we’ve received in the Fireside Chat series to date. And BONUS: Roblox posted two jobs on the Braintrust platform as a result. This is proving to be an incredibly scalable and cost-effective way to mine the network for new talent + jobs.
Grateful as always for your support. If you have any questions or comments you can message me on Twitter (link below.)
All the best,
Adam
@adamjacksonsf
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