Acadium

“We were actually hiring An intern for another project we were working on and we had like over a hundred applicants. Nobody had experience and they needed experience. So they would come and volunteer to work with our company.”

“It was a tremendous amount of matching effort to actually get them matched with each other for something that is, you know, relatively low value and should be low touch point. So it just wasn't worth the effort in a way because of the way we were doing it manu…”

“If the conversions are not good, but they're decent, that's totally fine because you know you can improve conversions by building a better product and a better website and better marketing. So if it converts with the shitty ass landing page, you know that you'…”

“We spent, you know, we paid someone five or 10 K to create all the courses for us. We haven't changed them. We haven't updated that technology at all. And people, you know, thousands of people a month still use it”

“And schools do a really bad job of training this. So for those reasons, we picked digital marketing and that was a good decision.”

“So yes, focus is important. It's a bit overrated in a way, But not, there's some things you absolutely need to focus on. Like one vertical made a lot of sense, but you know, focusing on multiple product iterations that could also really work for you because it…”

“Apprenticeships and work experience allowed us to build a wedge and a brand In finding marketing talent and launching a marketing career. But, you know, we can now sell businesses on any kind of marketing talent because we have this amazing brand that is the n…”

“And in exchange for mentorship, They get help from their apprentice. 10 hours a week for three months. It's a 120 hour relationship. And it's totally affordable for businesses. They pay a fee to use the marketplace. They can get one or multiple apprentices. Th…”

“So we have over 70,000 apprentices on our platform.”

“It costs 400 dollars a quarter. It's about a hundred bucks a month.”

“Yeah, I think a little more than 3000 businesses.”

“And I ended up signing the first 300 businesses myself, just really hustling in Facebook groups.”

“There's some older customers cause we've actually increased the price over time. We've been more than doubled the price actually.”

“It would be around 200,000 dollars in revenue.”

“We do ISAs on the apprentice side. So there's a small there, 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 their career.…”

“So we've been growing 15 to 20% for the last few months, but there was a long period where we were contracting.”

“So we raised about a million dollars from some fantastic investors, Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt Eric Blatchford, who's the CEO of Expedia. We had 500 startups as well.”

“There is a scenario where this year will be profitable. So we do have an opportunity to, we're going to make a decision 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 …”

“We get it in sub one year.”

“There was a time where, when we were growing very quickly in 2019, and we grew the team to, we had a few different, we had a management team, and it became really, really slow, actually. And that was a bad, that was just a bad thing in general for a startup, i…”