Explosive marketplace growth: GenM CEO, Moe Abbas, shares how they built a rapidly expanding two-sided marketplace that connects apprentices to real-world job experiences

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Moe Abbas, CEO of GenM, a marketplace for digital marketing apprenticeships that has attracted over 60,000 students and 30,000 businesses in its first 2 years of business.   Sean’s goal with this interview is to understand what is truly driving breakout growth success for GenM’s marketplace. GenM’s growth starts with strong product/market fit and a worthy mission of fixing the broken internship model. Their solution connects students with businesses for digital marketing apprenticeships. The language of “apprenticeships” is an intentional departure from the more traditional language of internships. But the solution goes beyond language to actually require that new businesses sign a commitment to true mentorship and teaching for students. GenM complements this hands-on training with courses that help the students bring real marketing skills to the relationship. GenM’s business model makes the program free for students and businesses pay just $89/month. The GenM team optimized to this price point after realizing that higher price points changed the nature of the relationship between the apprentice and the business.  At this price point, businesses are willing to mentor and teach the apprentice.      The North Star Metric for the entire team is to expand the weekly active apprenticeships. As a two-sided marketplace, this North Star Metric is driven by distinct growth engines for both the business and the student sides of the marketplace. Students are largely attracted to free education and on the job experience. Businesses, on the other hand, are attracted to the idea of mentoring and teaching an apprentice in exchange for 10 hours/week of marketing help.  In his role at GenM as CEO, Moe Abbas has worked to nurture a “test and learn” growth mindset across the company. This is evident in the rapid experimentation that the team has with everything from how they onboard new businesses and students to the prices that they charge for the service.  Learn more about Moe Abbas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moeabbas/?originalSubdomain=ca And learn more about GenM here: www.genm.co  Get full access to Sean’s Substack at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe