Photo: Ruslan Pryanikov for https://kapital.kz/

About Appboxo

My co-founder and I developed applications for tourists that were supposed to combine all the necessary travel services at once: from the delivery of food and clothes, to ordering a taxi, booking airline tickets and hotels. But during development, we encountered an integration problem, and we learned about the mini app technology. Thanks to this technology, we will be able to solve not only our problem, but also the problem of other applications and developers. This is how we came up with the idea of ​​creating a platform for integrating Appboxo apps. This software is currently used by various applications. We are currently working with banks, telecommunications companies and mobile wallet operators in India and countries in Southeast Asia, South and North Africa. At the moment we have 8 integrated applications. More than 2 million people worldwide use our platforms every month. This number is growing every day.

Tips for startups on how to quickly launch and scale their ideas

First, you need to find your potential customers. You need to start developing a product after there is an understanding that there is a demand for your product.

There are no boundaries for scaling any project now. You can find clients all over the world, being in Kazakhstan. If you have an idea of ​​who could potentially use your product overseas, reach out to that company or person on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook and pitch your product to them.
For example, we have some big partners: Gcash mobile wallet in the Philippines, PayTM mobile wallet in India, and we recently started working with Vodacom in South Africa.

All our communication with partners goes through the social network LinkedIn. By the way, this is one of the criteria for hiring an employee in our company. It is very important that our candidates have a LinkedIn account.

On mobile app development trends in 2022-2023

We are in the Super app industry. Today, this trend is actively developing abroad. We hope that in 2022 this trend will become even more popular.

At the moment, our main focus is the promotion and improvement of our current product. We are currently working on two projects. One of which is aimed at making it easy for different businesses to run mini-apps.

When working on a project, it is difficult to find talent, smart developers with experience. When hiring, we have our own criteria: to know English, to be energetic, to be result-oriented.
About Kazakhstan

I have been living in Almaty since the age of 5. My parents still live in this city.

There are a lot of talented engineers in Kazakhstan who work for local companies. I think that they can be offered an interesting job abroad, which they can do without leaving Kazakhstan.

We already have a fairly large team in Bishkek. Accordingly, we want to assemble another team in Kazakhstan.

About corporate culture

We have week Wednesdays. We do every day morning check-ins by teams. Team calls are held every two weeks, where we share product updates and exchange ideas.

About plans

We want to build the strongest technical team in Kazakhstan. We don't need a hundred developers. We want a small number of developers, but that everyone be masters of their craft.

Our main focus now is on cooperation with the countries of Southeast Asia.

3 underrated and 1 overrated things in creating a successful product

List of underestimated things:

- distribution;

- design;

- LinkedIn. This social network is underestimated in Kazakhstan, while abroad it plays an important role in the life of developers.

Overpriced:

• technology. Today there is such a trend as “no-code”. That is, you can develop a product without code. It is not necessary to have a huge development team to create an IT product.