Abwaab: democratizing learning in MENA

Biography:

Hamdi Tabbaa is the CEO and co-founder of Abwaab, a Jordanian edtech startup. 

Abwaab provides online lessons on various topics, designed for students up to 18 years old. The content is aligned with national school curriculums, making it pertinent for exam preparation. Abwaab also offers tools that help students test themselves and track their progress. 

The company has raised over $30M in funding. Prior to Abwaab, Hamdi launched a supermarket chain and led Uber’s MENA expansion. 

Your first entrepreneurial venture failed. What did you learn? 

Right after university, I launched Dukkan, a supermarket chain here in Jordan. I was inspired by the British Tesco model and wanted to bring organized retail to the region. 

I ran the business for over six years, trying everything in my power to make it work. I managed to painfully sell it while I was starting my new job at Uber. 

At Dukkan, I hugged the pie and wanted most of the company to myself. I took the opposite approach at Abwaab: I shared equity with co-founders, took on multiple investors, implemented stock option plans for employees… For your company to work, different supportive parties need skin in the game. 

Dukkan was my entrepreneurial university: I learned more lessons than I can enumerate (thinking I knew the market, spreading too thin, unrealistic margins…)

You then worked at Uber for over four years. Apart from the network, what did Uber equip you with?

I was initially in charge of Uber’s Jordan expansion, which turned into heading its MENA expansion. I led multi-country operations, without much guidance from management other than “figure it out”. That forges operational knowhow. 

While Uber didn’t give me precise instructions on how to do my job, they gave me resources to run my experiments. This led to two lessons I’ve plugged into Abwaab. 

The first is the importance of your company’s capitalization. Dukkan was cash-strapped, and I realized the difference that having sufficient resources makes. I promised myself that if I started another business, I’d raise the money I needed to fund its ambition. 

The second was the crucial role internal infrastructure plays in scaling. “Under the hood work” so to speak. That’s one of Abwaab’s primary goals for next year: build robust, internal tech infrastructure to support our growth. 

Indirectly, my experience at Uber equipped me with a co-founder as well! One of my co-founders (Sabri) used to be general manager at Careem, Uber’s main regional competitor (which Uber ended up acquiring).

What’s Abwaab’s thesis?

The MENA region counts around 100 million kids below the age of 18. Most of them attend public schools. And the region’s public schools have both a quantity and a quality problem. 

The quantity problem is that there are more students than schools. To palliate, some schools run multiple shifts a day, each student cohort learning for three hours only. There’s also a lack of sufficient teachers. If your village’s school couldn’t source a physics teacher, you’re not learning physics. As a student, this handicaps you for life.

The quality problem stems from a lack of resources. Regional governments don’t have enough money to properly invest in quality public education. Jordan’s PISA scores have been declining at worst, stagnating at best. 

These problems created a parallel industry of offline tutoring centers, plugging the gaps public schools left open. These tutoring centers are busy day and night. Students learn the same things they were supposed to learn at school, but better. 

This isn’t a MENA-specific problem. In India, the tutor industry got so big that influencer tutors rent out stadiums to give lessons. Byju’s, one of India’s biggest edtech startups, was founded by such a tutor influencer (unsurprisingly named Byju). 

The additional income parents spend on these centers heavily weighs on their wallets. Abwaab wanted to provide a more practical, tailored and cheaper alternative to them. 

Internal Abwaab slide

What are Abwaab’s main features today?

The product’s goal is to help students excel. Our stated mission is to unleash human potential. 

Each student is handheld throughout their learning journey by an advisor, which we call “Morshed”. That advisor guides the student through creating a schedule, staying up to date, tracking their progress… All of this visible via a dashboard. Morsheds have also ended up providing emotional support for students during exam preparation season, which we didn’t expect.

Then come the actual lessons (interactive videos we produce in-house, either live or recorded), complemented by transcripts and summaries students can read through afterwards. 

Finally comes the assessment part, where students can test their knowledge through mock tests and get instant feedback.

These are Abwaab’s three main pillars, but we’ll touch upon additional ones later. 

How do you pay the teachers producing these videos? Are they Abwaab employees?

Every Abwaab teacher gets a tailored contract. Some “star” teachers get paid based on the additional sales volume they generate, while others sign a fixed-fee contract. Generally, our teachers hold teaching positions somewhere else. We encourage that because it ensures they stay up to date with the latest curriculum evolutions. Today, we work with around 300 teachers. 

How does Abwaab make money?