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July was our toughest month yet this year (even factoring in seasonality) - details and stats below - but August/September are shaping up to be much better as we start to see clients ramp up hiring again + highly leveraged growth with our partnerships program.
Platform Improvements to increase efficiency & GSV growth:
- Self Serve: Clients can now log on and post a job without speaking to a human. Result is a huge (10x) increase in job postings. We’re focused closely on conversion to ensure this translates to GSV.
- Direct referral + automation: Users can now refer clients directly to Braintrust, which means the client hires faster, and the referrer earns faster. Previously a human had to intervene and vet the lead, but now this is all automated via the product (resulting in 26 client signups already in August).
- Improved sales & matching automation: continued strong progress on AI-enabling our sales reps and major improvements to our talent/job matching algorithm. The matching algorithm has been trained on historical data, and vetted by our talent matchers. More upgrades coming in September.
- Professional Network: continued growth in engagement (new questions, posts responded to). In July, we introduced bookmarking and following content and an updated set of reactions to enhance the community’s engagement with helpful answers growing WAU. We made significant progress on a forthcoming AI model we plan to release in August that will make each users' feed more relevant.
- 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.
Client (demand) side performance:
- MQLs continued to trend down due to global macro conditions, but the new Self Serve launch is already boosting this number substantially though in August (5x+)
- Partnerships drove 31 new client accounts in Q2 so despite MQLs being down, partnerships (Deel, Worksome, Papaya, Oyster) have helped increase our overall new client volume (especially in SMB)
- In July we signed Fortune 1000 clients like Target, Caterpillar, and Pepsi, but our new GCV and GSV are both down QoQ (-39% and -2% respectively). H2 target of 48 new ENT clients.
- In terms of who is hiring and for which jobs, we’re seeing a spike in AI-related opportunities representing close to 20% of all jobs on Braintrust. And, in the last 12 months Braintrust has gone from having only 3,800 Talent with AI or ML as a skill to 18,000+.
- Growing mix of non-technical roles the past 4 months (marketing & project management)
- Zoom-out takeaway: we’re hearing repeatedly from our demand-gen partners and clients that enterprises are shedding high-cost vendors, while Braintrust is still winning new business due to our low cost, high quality service model. This cost-cutting and consolidation motion we’re seeing for enterprise clients is starting to benefit Braintrust and will only accelerate as macro recovers.
Talent (supply) side performance:
- We continue to see record breaking talent sign ups (43,000 in the past month alone), bringing total talent users to over 436k.
- Engagement on the platform remains steady as well with over 38k talent users returning to the platform every week to apply for jobs and get career help.
- We recently hosted our quarterly talent all hands and received over 1674 RSVP’s. The session was an energizing event where we covered network updates and the upcoming product roadmap, you can see some of the 30+ questions asked on the Career Help feed. Recap and video here.
How you can help:
- Client referrals are the NUMBER ONE source of new business for us. Plus, you earn 2% of what any new client bills in BTRST. So PLEASE, share your personal referral link (here) with your networks - on social, email, etc.
- Do you have any HR-tech / payroll / SaaS companies in your network (similar to Deel) that need a talent partner? This channel is working well for us and we’d like to expand it. It’s also a win for the partner because they create more value for their clients and can expand their seat licenses in many cases.
- Do you have any AI companies in your portfolio/ network? We would love to get on their radar and let them know they can source high quality AI talent from Braintrust.
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
Join Braintrust: https://app.usebraintrust.com/r/adam3/
Braintrust dashboard: https://info.braintrust.com
Podcast: www.adamjacksonshow.xyz
