GenM

Moe Abbas had already built a successful construction company in Canada, but felt called to the tech industry. While hiring a marketing intern for a social media app project, he and his co-founder Richard noticed a troubling pattern: 200 applicants for one position, almost all with zero work experience. This sparked months of research into why the education system was failing millions of students. Moe realized the system was fundamentally broken—expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective at launching careers. He decided to build something radical: a free education platform trained by industry, for industry.

Moe didn't rush. Having been burned before by investing too heavily in unproven ideas, he started with just a landing page to test if the concept would convert. It did. Then he added a paywall to see if students would pay. Many did. This validation gave him conviction to build an MVP, but the path wasn't straightforward. He originally planned to spend just a few months on courses but ended up iterating for 9 months. Early attempts to invent a novel learning method failed, so Moe switched strategy and learned from the best education apps, allowing him to accelerate and focus his real innovation on the apprenticeship marketplace itself.

When the apprenticeship marketplace launched, "everything changed." Moe's early growth strategy was pure hustle: posting in Facebook groups and creating a simple funnel to get small businesses on the phone. "I closed the first 200 businesses doing this," he recalls. Early calls were awkward, but he built a script, grew confident, and managed to close ⅓ of his calls in the first interaction. This manual process proved the business model worked at scale—he had product-market fit.

The cold-calling playbook proved the concept but wasn't sustainable long-term. Once Moe had PMF, he hired a salesperson and pivoted to building out a proper marketing machine with a heavy focus on referrals. "Our product was novel enough that businesses would share it," he explains. A high-quality referral program "just blew up," providing the scalability that manual outreach couldn't. For students, he found success targeting communities of marketers and building key partnerships. The critical insight: a two-sided marketplace requires different growth strategies for each side, and both must scale in tandem.

By the time of this interview (March 2019), GenM was generating revenue at $49/month per business subscription and had become "one of the fastest growing startups in Canada." The company was doubling its team with a clear long-term vision: become the platform where students launch careers and small businesses find affordable, trained talent. The apprenticeship model had proven itself, and Moe was focused on building the business infrastructure to achieve his larger mission.