How Usebraintrust CEO Sander Arias grew Usebraintrust to $54.9M revenue and 24 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is adam jackson he's the co-founder of brain trust the first user owned talent network that matches tech talent with clients before this company he co-founded doctor on demand a popular video telemedicine provider with daytime talk show personality dr phil adam you're ready to take it to the top hey good to see you all right be here so you i'm going off memory here so correct me if i'm wrong but you were effectively making the case about 19 20 months ago that you are going to basically take and do what indeed has done but put it and think more web three and enable people who bring talent to the platform to participate in the upside the platform creates as well is that accurate yeah you got it and it's a slight difference from from indeed so indeed's like a job board it's like hey we posted openings somebody fills it goes away braintrust is actually a marketplace so the difference being you post a job we actually host the transaction on brain trust all the reputation work history and all that good stuff actually accrues to you on brain trust and so the the whole process and then happens on the marketplace so it's not just a job i see i see icic so it's a it's a would you call it a closed ecosystem then no no it's a labor marketplace okay cool labor marketplace so talk to me a little bit about what happened here so it was 19 months ago how did you how did you did you have anyone like you were you issuing tokens effectively did you do like a token to raise an ico if you want to call it that yeah so we we started out uh giving people tokens that were basically off chain they weren't real tokens in in exchange for you know they're like create like an iou for a token right and they were in exchange for helping us bring in more talent vet that talent bring on more clients on board the clients all the things that you would do as a normal company you'd raise hundreds of millions of dollars for and have you know 25 000 employees we we invert that we you know you have the community do all the work our core teams only have like 30 35 people working on them um until we were last time you and i spoke yeah we were like just getting out the gate then covid hit remote work became the new normal the brain trust model became really in demand and then fast forward to september of 2021 last year uh our token hit the ethereum main net okay and what does that mean for folks that are not familiar with crypto sure yeah it's it just means the brain trust token bt rst uh is now live on the blockchain and can be given to anyone who helps the network it can be bought and sold on coinbase um it's it's a live token ecosystem it's not a test net anymore and so how did you what value did people you gave the fake tokens to before you were listed how did they now translate into real value under bt rst yeah it's totally market driven so it's just you know total supply and demand dynamics uh when they were minted uh before the the network when they were i o used that they had no cash value whatsoever um and they're you know it's it's a governance token so there's uh there's a few different uses for it but it's one token one vote on the system so all the all the rules of the network like how many what fees should talent and clients pay what should the product roadmap be you know what should we build next those are all sort of determined through token voting so it's a governance token and then a recent protocol upgrade the tokens actually used uh the pro the network requires clients to pay their network fees in the brain trust token so you have the protocol going out and buying its own token um interesting okay so when you when you list this i'm looking at coinbase.com forward slash price forward slash brain trust in september last year the token hit a value of 32.55 um hit a low in january well last month of 2.13 now it's up to like five bucks what causes this kind of volatility well crypto is really volatile i mean it's just a such a nascent asset class um that i think you know these tokens are people are still figuring out uh what they're worth to folks on the network you know to to make a clear distinction like the the cash value of the brain trust token is actually not relevant to the network right it's it's one token one vote the more tokens you have the more influence you have over the network so whether that token's worth 10 cents or a dollar is not actually they're relevant to the operation of the network oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview uh understood understood but if someone goes man i really like this adam guy i want to i want can they buy these tokens they have to earn them uh you buy them well they can't buy them from us so you'd have to go go to coin let's say i have no intention of bringing freelancers onto brain trust but i believe in the vision and i think you're going to beat fiber over the long term i might today go in and buy 10 bt rst tokens at five bucks and then let the system keep doing its thing and then one day maybe it goes up to 60 bucks and i want to cash out a little bit right um so why do you say that the token value doesn't matter to the ecosystem isn't that an important part of this um i mean it's not irrelevant right but the functionality of the token doesn't depend on cash value right the folks that have earned that we've had you know 40 000 plus folks earn tokens over the last couple years in exchange for helping build the network invite talent that the talent invite clients a lot of those the vast vast majority of those folks have kept their tokens because they they represent control influence voting power over the network and that's where the cash value piece doesn't matter right like it's always one token one vote no matter what the token's worth in us dollar terms so right now when i'm on coinbase it says there's 87.9 million btrst circulating supply and then under it says that's 35 of the total supply where's the other 65 percent you got it yeah the other 65 is basically sitting in treasury waiting to be given out to further contributors and who controls what the treasury spends money on uh two entities first is the code itself so the network software itself uh runs the referral engine so if nathan latke comes in it goes to braintrust.com creates an account as a connector right there's talent who do the work there's clients who hire the talent and then there's connectors who are essentially people making intros nathan comes in anybody can come in get a code unique code and then if you refer talent and they start transacting or if you refer a client and they start transacting you're going to start earning bonuses on based on a percentage of those transactions in the form of the brain trust token those tokens come out of treasury and it's all done by...