ON October 13, Growth Velocity Academy (GVA) will be welcoming its first batch of aspiring Saudi digital marketers and growth hackers, comprising of 100 entrepreneurs, corporates and “career transitioners” looking to leverage the digital space to grow their businesses and careers.

With a solid track record of building their last business to 20 million users in under 18 months, the founders of Growth Velocity Academy have established the school to fast track skill building for aspiring entrepreneurs as well as corporates in Saudi Arabia and beyond.

Established just under a year ago, GVA has already run a number of workshops & bootcamps in Lebanon and South Africa which have sold out in a matter of days, with many of their alumni going on to secure job promotions and new roles within days of completing the One Week Intensive Bootcamps. The 1-week course is selling for SR7,500, which is a considerable discount when compared to similar courses taught at General Assembly in London.

Omar Lababedi, founder of GVA and a successful serial entrepreneur, had this to say of the company’s vision “I want Growth Velocity Academy to go beyond simply providing people in the region with the latest tech skills, I want to bridge the huge skill gap that exists between employers and employees.”

Indeed, GVA’s mission is to positively impact the lives of 1m people across the MENA region over the next 5 years by bringing Europe’s leading tech entrepreneurs in to run various tech bootcamps that span digital marketing, user experience and data science.

Taking place in Jeddah’s freshest co-working space aka Vibes, GVA will be running a 2-hour workshop on “How to get your first 5,000 customers” - giving people a glimpse into how some of Silicon-Valley’s top startups use Growth Hacking to scale rapidly. The workshop will be followed by GVA’s flagship One-Week Intensive Digital Marketing Bootcamp - which will take place in early December. Both the workshop and the bootcamp will be run by GVA’s lead instructor and London based co-founder Howard Kingston.

Howard Kingston, the lead instructor said “The world is changing. People no longer care about what you say you can do but what you can actually do. Today, skills matter more than degrees”. This resonates with the sentiment of Elon Musk’s announcement last November. — SG