How Acadium Inc CEO Moe Abbas grew Acadium Inc to $1.1M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is mo abbas he started his first landscaping business when he was 18. sold that and started residential design and build company and that he grew that to one of the largest in north america after reaching the top of that reaching the top of that industry he wanted a new challenge where his work could have a positive impact on the world and he founded acadium as a result it's a way to enable economic mobility to anyone with an internet connection mo you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right what's the business what are you guys working on so acadium is a marketplace that enables anyone with an internet connection to launch a career and come to an apprenticeship with a business owner get work experience skills relationship it's totally free it's 10 hours a week it's on their own schedule there's also free courses and on the other end you have small business owners who often are cash constrained and wearing multiple hats they need help and in exchange for mentorship they get help from their apprentice 10 hours a week for three months to 120 hour relationship and it's uh totally affordable for businesses they pay a fee to use the marketplace they can get one or multiple apprentices the apprenticeship itself is unpaid the exchange of value is help for mentorship traditional marketplaces it's help for pay but in our marketplace we're very focused on the education aspect and ensuring that apprentices get a good training experience so remove the pay aspect and allow both sides to focus on value that's motivating for both sides and help me understand last month how many businesses paid for at least one apprentice and how many apprentices did at least you know one hour of training so we have over seventy thousand apprentices on our plat i've used our platform last month i don't know the exact number for last month uh and for the businesses there's you know several thousand that are active at any time looking for an apprenticeship and how do you define active does that mean they actually find and pay you at least once per month yeah so in order to get access to the platform they have to become a member then they have complete access okay what does it cost the businesses to get access to the apprentice network it cost four hundred dollars a quarter it's about a hundred bucks a month about a hundred bucks a month interesting so you have this flat theme model um do you take is there any other revenue you make sort of in between the transaction between these two parties or just the 50 model right now it's just a flat fee but many businesses end up hiring their apprentice so there's a scenario in the future where will help them hire people businesses are looking for full-time hire can enter a more a concierge type of experience where will help them find a great match that they could use as a full-time hire okay and sorry just to make sure i got this too you said you've got a couple without like what 3 000 businesses actively on the platform something like that yeah i think a little more than three thousand businesses okay great give me the back story here when did you guys launch so we've launched about two and a half three years ago and it's been quite a journey just figuring out what both sides of the marketplace want we had this crazy idea that businesses can provide job training there's two worlds that exist in one world job training is controlled by centralized institutions education post-secondary institutions that are very expensive costs a lot of money only available a small subset of people and frankly do a really bad job 53 of graduates are unemployed that's the world that we live in that's the world is actually changing very quickly especially with kovid the world that we imagined and we're building with acadium is one where anyone with an internet connection can launch a career as long as they have the motivation and will too they can come to acadium they can get access to courses work experience hiring relationships for free wherever they are and this enables economic mobility to anyone around the world and this is something we're very very passionate about and the coolest part is particularly the people that benefit the most are the underprivileged those that have barriers that are related to socio-economic barriers or geographical barriers we remove them and we have tons of stories of apprentices who are were able to launch new careers for free made to because of acadium and do you remember that first year in business in 2018 how much revenue you were able to do it was really hard at first we actually built a one player mode it's two-sided marketplace you have a chicken and egg problem and in our business we focus on the student side we actually focus quite heavily on on both sides but on the student side particularly was super important to get liquidity there so we built a whole course curriculum and digital marketing got one side of the marketplace through some growth hacks that we knew and then we focused on the other side we had no revenue for a while we were close to death for a while and it came to the point where we just had to hustle and i ended up selling the first 300 businesses myself just really hustling in facebook groups what year was that i think it was 2017 2018. okay so that was that was the launch there so so when you signed up those first 300 customers do you remember that first year what total revenue was 2018. yeah we went from zero to 30 or 40 km pretty quickly and then from actually went from zero to 70k in revenue within the first year okay so so it did about 70 000 bucks that first year and now fast forward to today can we take 3 000 customers times 400 bucks a quarter that means what you guys are doing like 300 000 a month in revenue something like that yeah there's some older customers because we've actually increased the price over time uh we've more than doubled the price actually so in the some of the legacy members of acadium have a different price point but that's that's some roughly what it looks like uh so do you think you can pass 200 000 this month or are you still pretty far away i mean i don't think we'll pass it this month and yeah so the the goal of this month is not to pass 300 000 sorry there's a bit of a delay there i don't know yeah yeah mo we're doing our best here with the connection sorry what i was asking was trying to get a sense of where you are right now in terms of revenue so last month how much revenue do you guys do last month i don't have the exact revenues on hand for us we focus quite heavily on apprenticeships and ensuring that our business members get value out of acadium and you know that's really the main focus is is ensuring that we bring in the right members who have the right expectations who can provide mentorship to our students and on the flip side of that getting students who are here because they want to launch a career in digital marketing yeah i know i get that but but you don't have a business to invest in that cause if you're not making money uh so that's what i'm trying to understand i mean are you north of two hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue at this point oh you cut out right when you said that how much it would be around two hundred thousand of you okay got it and do you think is the path moving forward to continue charging businesses you think or are there any other revenue models you might experiment with so we actually have one that's active we do isas on the apprentice side so there's a small there are you know apprentices who are dedicated on launching a career in digital marketing they have the option of joining our acadian plus program where it's an isa model we help them launch a career it's more touch points it's a more in-depth experience and then we do a an isa income share agreement for them and so we do monetize both sides um and the next focus is to extract did really to deliver more value to our businesses because we create a lot of hiring relationships in the stadium but a positive churn it's also a revenue generating opportunity so the future is one where we help businesses find talent not just get help but find an onboard talent around the world and and with this sort of focus right the current revenue stream the isas what does growth look like the past year if you're at 200 000 a month today what were you at a year ago i know the isa program has grown about fivefold in the last year and it's all been through the marketplace so we don't actually market externally it's just an offering we have it's almost like a freemium model in the marketplace itself yeah sorry just looking at your your recurring revenue right you're at 200 000 today what were you at a year ago i mean to be honest where our revenue was we actually had slightly higher revenue at one time and then it dipped quite dramatically when we re focused on quality over quantity we grew our revenues very quickly in 2019 and it was in an unsustainable way we were selling members that were churning very rapidly we weren't really vetting them you know they were here for the wrong reasons and we decided that we'd rather have a quality community that could deliver on our mission of acadia and then just you know jack up revenues so we took a big revenue hit in 2020 and now we are you know rebuilding that back to where it was and beyond 2019. so would you say maybe the past 12 months you're basically been flat over the past that period well now we are in we are growing so we've been growing 15 to 20 percent for the last few months but there was a long period where we were contracting we just were...