SBAM!

Tell us about SBAM! today: what do you do, for whom, and what problem do you solve better than anyone else?

SBAM! is a tool that helps young people make more informed career choices, both in continuing their studies and in entering the job market. Our target is Gen Z, the 16-26 age range, and we work with institutions, training providers, and companies: from high schools to universities, all the way to ITS (post-secondary technical institutes). On paper the startup was founded in 2023, but in practice it’s a new company born at the start of this year, after a major pivot.

We went from a B2C service to a B2B2C / B2G2C model: we work with institutions and companies to bridge the gap between school and work. On the product side, that turned into a feature called “courses”: educational paths made up of videos that give young people a preview — a kind of trailer — of what they’ll find in a course of study or a job, to guide them before they choose. The social component, which was the heart of the app’s first version, is still there today, but as a side feature: the core is guidance.

The problem we solve better than anyone else is the distance between school and work. In Italy there are plenty of companies trying to bridge that gap, but in practice they almost always end up slow, tilted toward one side, or weighed down by red tape. We’re betting on something immediate, simple, and direct, built on Gen Z’s language: getting the right candidate to the right company for the right position.

You made a major pivot, choosing to focus on Gen Z career guidance. How did you realize that was the direction to go?

We started with an app built to fight young people’s social isolation. Exploring the education space, we realized social isolation and guidance were closely linked: people who don’t know which path to take tend to lose their way, and that weighs on their relationships too. That’s when we understood guidance wasn’t just a simple extension of the product — it could become its center.

What used to be a secondary feature became the core of the business and of the startup. It was a real turnaround: we basically built a new company on the skeleton of the old one. Confirmation came from the field — six very intense months where we personally went into a lot of schools, running sessions and meetings with students and teachers — and from the numbers too: a boost in revenue and, above all, in the kind of relationships and the business model. Guidance, among other things, is far more monetizable: on the other side there are companies paying for recruitment processes and institutions with an interest in bringing in enrollments.

What’s the need Gen Z has around work that the market and institutions still struggle to pick up on, and that you’re trying to fill?

There’s a huge divide, and in some ways a healthy one. On one side, a lot of young people no longer want to accept underpaid jobs or below-market conditions — sometimes understandably, sometimes on downright specious grounds. On the other side, there are companies trying to meet these expectations, and others that stick to “we’ve always done it this way” and just complain that young people don’t want to work.

What’s missing, in our view, is a smoother bridge. There’s no shortage of tools, associations, and companies that are supposed to connect school and work, but in practice there’s always too much distance, too much imbalance, or too much red tape. Gen Z thinks differently: they live on TikTok, they want things fast, simple, and direct, and the “we’re one big family” logic of the ’70s and ’80s is rightly gone. What’s needed is something immediate, able to get the right candidate to the right company for the right position. That sentence says it all: the problem and the solution.

What concrete benefits has this new focus brought, both to the business and to the real impact you have on young people?

On the business side, the pivot brought a boost in revenue and a step up in the quality of our relationships and our model. Moving from B2C to B2B2C / B2G2C made us interesting to a lot more players, because guidance is a much more monetizable topic: companies pay for HR processes and for engaging young people, institutions are interested in bringing in enrollments — and with them, tuition and training to offer. This opened up contacts and partnerships that weren’t on the table before.

For young people the impact is even clearer, and it works on two levels. The first is socializing: we were born to fight isolation, and we still have features like events, outings, and networking activities to make friends and build relationships. I often use the ugly duckling metaphor: it didn’t shine because it wasn’t in the right environment, with people able to understand and value it. The second level is guidance in the true sense: figuring out what to do with your life. Not knowing that means wasting time, getting disappointed, and in extreme cases ending up outside society, without a job. In a word, all of this comes down to growth — and that’s also the meaning of our tagline for young people: “find your path and new friends to walk it with”.

What value do opportunities like the TMB – Tuscany Mediterranean Bridge, born within the Gate REI ecosystem, have for a startup?

Experiences like the TMB are among the most valuable, because for a startup the real value comes through relationships. Putting around fifty founders from different parts of the world in the same room creates connections that are hard to build any other way: contacts, comparisons across different markets, real opportunities to collaborate.

For us it was also a turning point along our path, one of the moments that fed into the thinking that eventually led to the pivot toward guidance. Beyond the numbers, the biggest impact of programs like this, generated by an ecosystem like Gate REI’s, is breaking the founder’s isolation — the same problem SBAM! is trying to solve for young people. In the Italian ecosystem you work ten times as hard as you would in Silicon Valley: being in the right environment, with people who understand you and value you, really does change your prospects.