— Askar, tell us why you decided to connect your life with tutoring. What appealed to you in the field of education?
— In school, I regularly took part in math olympiads — both national and international. I once counted: I participated in more than 50 competitions and placed in about 40 of them. In my first year at Al-Farabi KazNU, I began earning money by teaching math to school students.
In big cities like Almaty and Astana, there are many strong specialists, but I managed to stay competitive — teenagers enjoyed learning from someone almost their own age. Gradually, I began traveling around the Almaty region so that kids in rural areas could look at math differently.
At university, I met Aibek Kuatbayev — we studied the same major. We crossed paths in different projects from time to time. In 2017, we started communicating more and realized that we shared values and a similar business vision. By then, I was teaching around a thousand students a year. I told Aibek I wanted to open my own school. He said, “Why just one? Don’t you want to teach all of Kazakhstan?” That made us think about a large-scale online project, and we developed the concept (positioning, scale, business model) for about a year.
Then I left for Kaunas, Lithuania, to complete an MBA program. After returning to Almaty, we decided to launch Daryn Online. The project quickly gained traction among students. Our MRR (monthly recurring revenue) gradually reached $500,000.
— What makes Daryn Online unique?
— Our core focus is preparing high school students for tests required to enter universities in Kazakhstan and abroad. Mentors track student progress and maintain communication with parents. Teachers deliver classes live, and students regularly take exams to monitor their learning outcomes.
We operate under a BNPL model (Buy Now, Pay Later, where users receive full access to the service and pay in several installments without loans or interest). Our offerings can be divided into three blocks:
1–4 grades — online after-school support, where we help children with their homework.
5–6 grades — preparation for entrance exams to specialized schools such as BIL and NIS.
9–11 grades — preparation for university entrance exams, both in Kazakhstan and abroad, where programs for international students are available.
We also launched several products within the Daryn Online ecosystem, such as Educenter — a platform for selling courses, the Ordagen kindergarten project, and Daryn Teacher courses for educators. We sold the offline kindergartens in May this year for just over 100 million tenge. However, the training program for kindergarten teachers remains part of the ecosystem.
More details available at Digitalbusiness.kz.
— Askar, tell us why you decided to connect your life with tutoring. What appealed to you in the field of education?
— In school, I regularly took part in math olympiads — both national and international. I once counted: I participated in more than 50 competitions and placed in about 40 of them. In my first year at Al-Farabi KazNU, I began earning money by teaching math to school students.
In big cities like Almaty and Astana, there are many strong specialists, but I managed to stay competitive — teenagers enjoyed learning from someone almost their own age. Gradually, I began traveling around the Almaty region so that kids in rural areas could look at math differently.
At university, I met Aibek Kuatbayev — we studied the same major. We crossed paths in different projects from time to time. In 2017, we started communicating more and realized that we shared values and a similar business vision. By then, I was teaching around a thousand students a year. I told Aibek I wanted to open my own school. He said, “Why just one? Don’t you want to teach all of Kazakhstan?” That made us think about a large-scale online project, and we developed the concept (positioning, scale, business model) for about a year.
Then I left for Kaunas, Lithuania, to complete an MBA program. After returning to Almaty, we decided to launch Daryn Online. The project quickly gained traction among students. Our MRR (monthly recurring revenue) gradually reached $500,000.
— What makes Daryn Online unique?
— Our core focus is preparing high school students for tests required to enter universities in Kazakhstan and abroad. Mentors track student progress and maintain communication with parents. Teachers deliver classes live, and students regularly take exams to monitor their learning outcomes.
We operate under a BNPL model (Buy Now, Pay Later, where users receive full access to the service and pay in several installments without loans or interest). Our offerings can be divided into three blocks:
1–4 grades — online after-school support, where we help children with their homework.
5–6 grades — preparation for entrance exams to specialized schools such as BIL and NIS.
9–11 grades — preparation for university entrance exams, both in Kazakhstan and abroad, where programs for international students are available.
We also launched several products within the Daryn Online ecosystem, such as Educenter — a platform for selling courses, the Ordagen kindergarten project, and Daryn Teacher courses for educators. We sold the offline kindergartens in May this year for just over 100 million tenge. However, the training program for kindergarten teachers remains part of the ecosystem.
More details available at Digitalbusiness.kz.
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