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 not focused on generating revenue we're focused on unit economics on delivering value to our members and just really ensuring that and it's because you know it becomes very in a marketplace especially the problems compound as the marketplace gets bigger and we just didn't want a marketplace we didn't want a business where you've sold thousands of thousands of business businesses and they were not getting a great experience so we refocused on the experience in 2020 put a lot of effort and energy on that and then now we are back into growing our member base aggressively um in 2021 and have you guys bootstrapped this or raised capital we've raised some capital i'm pretty capital efficient in general and we have good unit economics uh so we raised about a million dollars from some fantastic investors ryan hoover from product hunt uh eric blatchford who was the ceo of expedia we had 500 startups as well um so what year was that rate that was 20 the end of 2019 2020 early 2020. okay okay great and do you have plans to sort of stay on the vp track did you have any plans to raise this year or no there is a scenario where this year will be profitable so we do have an opportunity to we're going to make a decision we where we will likely end up raising because you know although we'll be profitable this year the mission of acadium is super important and there's something to be said about providing these life-changing opportunities to people around the world and so how much do you think you'll end up raising or targeting at least [Music] i mean we will be profitable right so but at the same time we have unit economics and we have some levers on the business side that we can pull on we're still not quite there yet in my opinion we still need to nail those levers and the unit economics but they are profitable right now they are so you are profitable last month you made more money in your bank than your expenses sorry i meant the unit economics are profitable so for every one dollar we spend we generate greater than four dollars in revenue but it's four dollars an arr in ltv so cocktail tv ratio okay but that can be super dangerous right because if it takes you four years to get that those four dollars we get in sub one year okay then you're adding four dollars and new ar for one dollar spent yes yeah yeah although arr is not the best metric to use in our business to be honest it's not like a traditional sas company because we do have an inherent churn where businesses end up hiring if they got a lot of success out of acadium they're going to hire their apprentice it doesn't have to be churn that could actually be expansion revenue but you have to monetize that for it to be expansion revenue so we're something that we're just really getting those june economics in place and then when we do have them in place we can go to have we can go have some meaningful conversation with investors and we'll have areas to deploy capital to really accelerate growth what's your team size today how many people 20 people any engineers yes yeah how many uh three engineers and one of my co-founders is an engineer did you how many co-founders do you guys have three co-founders oh wow that's a three getting three people to decide on one thing is not always easy pretty easy for us you guys have never had a disagreement you're always on the same page oh god no there's plenty of disagreements but the truth comes out you just have to have conversations with people and no you know that was part of the problem actually there was a time where when we were growing very quickly in 2019 and we we grew the team to old third we had a few different management team and it became really really slow actually and that was the bad that was just bad thing in general for a startup in my opinion so we actually leaned down our management team and refocused on and being leaner frankly and you're able to move faster because of that so no we don't me and my co-founders we've been together for a while we have a great relationship we're able to make decisions and they all contribute different value like they they think differently or we think i like in a way we also think differently you know one's a product manager designer the other one's an engineer and and then there's myself yeah that's great that's great well we'll see what happens over the next year as you keep them in the marketplace in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um the book that i got the most value i i read every day for one to two hours and i kind of lost count of how many books right but most value out of is the dune series and it really it's a science fiction book i don't know if it counts as a business book but the benefit of dune is the time horizon you know the the saga spans over about over 5000 years so it really gives you a long-term perspective on things and i find that to be tremendously valuable in business number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah i obsess so again this is something right now i'm reading the uh twitter story i think it's called hatchling uh but i've studied all the tech ceos i think most tech founders pick a ceo as a ceo you're following most right now where you learn the most from it's hard to pick one okay okay right now it would be first i'd rate a ceo to be clear by any means but he's the person i'm currently studying i don't think he's the greatest ceo great but he's currently studying jack dorsey number three what's your favorite online tool for building acadium uh building acadium i mean he talking engineering-wise talking community you know this is your online tool whatever that means to you all right i like slack okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night solid eight hours of sleep that's important and what's your situation married single kids i have two children oh great are you married i tell you yeah i guess you could say i'm married oh okay two two kids it's weird because i'm separated but we have a great relationship that's good that's important okay and how old are you how old am i yeah i'm 35. okay take us back to when you were 20. what's something you wish you knew then i wish i knew about silicon valley when i was 20 and technology you know in the mobile world and the internet you know so it was just coming out when i was 20. i was in in canada where you just didn't really know the impact that would have i wish i knew about that place of the world kaiser have it acadium did seventy thousand dollars their first year in 2018 in total sales as uh mo hustled for their first 300 customers today were 3 000 businesses pay to find apprentices through the platform they pay on average 100 a month or about 300 400 bucks a quarter they're around 200 000 a month in revenue called up a little bit year over year but they're still trying to grow back to where they were uh back in 2019 levels when they had really incredible growth they've got a team of 20 people three engineers they raised a million bucks to keep driving this growth we'll maybe raise later this year once they keep improving their unit economics mo thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 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