Gabe discusses launching Braintrust as a Web3 marketplace, facing skepticism about token-driven models and enterprise adoption during the 2018 crypto winter. After a rocky start, demand exploded in mid-2020 with 258 inbound leads in one month, hitting $3.5M in revenue against a $500k projection.
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So what were some of the, some of the biggest challenges that you faced early on? Because I'm sure there were quite a few.
Yeah. All right. So let me go in my rewind machine. I have a bunch of scar tissue around this one. So I would say that the first thing is that we did a bunch of customer development, right? So like we went out, our thesis was actually that when you drop the fees down to zero for talent and 10% to clients, like you enable like actual enterprise transactions to happen on the network, which nobody in the labor marketplaces had really tapped yet. So we went and interviewed a bunch of enterprises, validated on that side, interviewed like probably 80 different freelancers to validate the business model. So we actually got a lot of confidence in the business model. And Adam and I like both had venture funds, right? And we had done pretty well off of our exits and stuff. So we could have actually just funded this thing ourselves, but we wanted, we actually wanted to go and raise from some great VCs, I think, as some, as like signaling. So we went out to go and raise this and we're like, we're gonna be done with this in a week. Like, this is a slam dunk. We did 110 pitch meetings and like, we're basically laughed out of Sand Hill. Like people literally said, if you wanna start an Indian restaurant, we'll fund you. Like, if you want to start a woman's shoe company, we'll fund you. Just don't do this. For a couple of reasons. One, it was like crypto winter, right? I don't know if you guys remember like end of 2018, like basically the investors were like, crypto's done. Like, like that happened in 2017. Like block— this whole blockchain thing is just done. And also like the— so the crypto people were like licking their wounds and then all the marketplace people were like, why would you want to drop fees to zero and give away ownership and control? Like, that doesn't make any sense. So they weren't really thinking from first principles. They were reasoning by analogy of like the way that the world has worked. So we were going out to raise $3 million in the seed round. It was a brutal, brutal experience. We ended up actually like 2x oversubscribing, but it was, I think that was kind of the first time we like really ran into a like a big challenge. It was unexpected. I just thought like, I saw it. It's like those things, all of you are like entrepreneurs, like you see a vision clear as day and sometimes everyone else doesn't see it quite yet. And so that was, I think, the first challenge. The next challenge I think was like getting all of the enterprises to sign up. Right. And what we found was that like talking about tokens to enterprises, especially in like in 2019, ended in a lot of like, we'll call you, don't call us conversations. And so it was a little bit hard, like in the beginning, cuz it, a lot of these enterprises weren't doing remote work, freelance, and also like crypto. So it was a little weird for them. So it took a little while and then And people were like kind of dipping their toes in the water. Like they would put a couple rolls on the platform, couple rolls on the platform. And then actually like, then COVID and the lockdown happened. And then in— we were supposed to come out of stealth, I think on March 20th, 2020, basically like the day that all the lockdowns happened. We ended up coming out of stealth in June of 2020. And We got 258 inbound leads in one month. And all of those enterprises that were dipping their toes in the water basically said, hey, the biggest barrier was this kind of like anachronistic thinking around butts in seats. And guess what? Like, game on. And so like these companies that were doing 1 or 2 roles put on 20 roles and 30 roles and 40 roles at a time onto the platform. And this thing just started growing organically. We were growing in 2020, we were growing sometimes upwards of 60% month over month, again with no marketing spend. And we've continued that, continued that pace. So we were, I think we were anticipating doing, we were anticipating doing like $500,000 in our first, like in that first 6 months we did $3.5 million. We were anticipating doing $5 million this year, we'll do almost $40 million. So I think that like some of these things are like right business model, right time. And then there's also like luck and timing and a bunch of other things mixed in there.
