As part of the joint project by Digital Business and Astana Hub, “100 Startup Stories of Central Asia,” Yersultan explained why the marketplace story didn’t work out and how the idea for TrustExam.ai came to him right in the maternity hospital. The discussion also covered the evolution of cheating and the tools used to fight it, as well as international expansion into European and African markets.
“We Were Given $600,000 and Offered to Launch a Full-Fledged Marketplace”
— Yersultan, tell us how you entered the startup industry?
— My mother is a mathematician, and I myself have always had a strong inclination toward this subject. However, after school I enrolled at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in the Faculty of International Relations. After a year, I realized it wasn’t for me and transferred to James Cook University in Singapore to study Computer Science.
Studying was quite challenging, so I decided to learn programming through practice—by working on real commercial projects. An academic internship at the Embassy of Kazakhstan helped me find an idea. There, I noticed that Singaporeans came to apply for visas but often had little understanding of where they were traveling and what was required. Many didn’t even know the minimum processing times for documents.
To solve this problem, my friends and I launched two informational travel portals—SeeKazakhstan.com and Discover-Kazakhstan.com. They contained all the necessary information for tourists about our country, as well as accurate rules for obtaining visas and other documents. We built the websites using online tutorials, and sourced the necessary content from books about Kazakhstan that we found at the embassy—running them through an OCR scanner and uploading the information to our sites.
Driving traffic to the websites was fairly straightforward—we agreed with the embassy to place a banner there and leave business cards. The next stage was monetization:
-
we integrated the Booking.com API;
-
signed partnerships with taxi services and hotels in Kazakhstan;
-
began collecting and processing requests for lawyers, guides, and translators.
Over time, our websites evolved from a student project into a profitable business that allowed us to pay for our studies and enjoy a comfortable student life. This was my first experience, which essentially taught me how to “walk” in the IT field.
— How did the projects develop after you returned to Kazakhstan?
— I wanted to scale them to other countries and seek support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But that didn’t work out—the Ministry already had its own plans for developing information portals.
However, the experience with travel websites gave us an understanding of how internet traffic algorithms and SEO work. We used this knowledge to launch new e-commerce projects. We created niche websites in various areas—beauty, sports, fitness devices—and brought them to the top of search results. It was around that time, in 2015, that I met my current co-founder and CTO, Eduard Zaukarnaev. Since then, he has been responsible for the technical side of all our projects.
Our success with e-commerce projects attracted investors, who allocated $600,000 and предложили запустить полноценный маркетплейс. That’s how Kupi.kz appeared—a portal with more than 120,000 product listings and over 500 orders per day at its peak. It was a major success.
However, due to internal organizational problems that negatively affected the entire team’s performance, we decided to shut the project down. For me, a 25-year-old at the time, this was psychologically very difficult. Such rapid growth—and then being abruptly brought back down to earth.
Read more on Digitalbusiness.kz.
As part of the joint project by Digital Business and Astana Hub, “100 Startup Stories of Central Asia,” Yersultan explained why the marketplace story didn’t work out and how the idea for TrustExam.ai came to him right in the maternity hospital. The discussion also covered the evolution of cheating and the tools used to fight it, as well as international expansion into European and African markets.
“We Were Given $600,000 and Offered to Launch a Full-Fledged Marketplace”
— Yersultan, tell us how you entered the startup industry?
— My mother is a mathematician, and I myself have always had a strong inclination toward this subject. However, after school I enrolled at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in the Faculty of International Relations. After a year, I realized it wasn’t for me and transferred to James Cook University in Singapore to study Computer Science.
Studying was quite challenging, so I decided to learn programming through practice—by working on real commercial projects. An academic internship at the Embassy of Kazakhstan helped me find an idea. There, I noticed that Singaporeans came to apply for visas but often had little understanding of where they were traveling and what was required. Many didn’t even know the minimum processing times for documents.
To solve this problem, my friends and I launched two informational travel portals—SeeKazakhstan.com and Discover-Kazakhstan.com. They contained all the necessary information for tourists about our country, as well as accurate rules for obtaining visas and other documents. We built the websites using online tutorials, and sourced the necessary content from books about Kazakhstan that we found at the embassy—running them through an OCR scanner and uploading the information to our sites.
Driving traffic to the websites was fairly straightforward—we agreed with the embassy to place a banner there and leave business cards. The next stage was monetization:
-
we integrated the Booking.com API;
-
signed partnerships with taxi services and hotels in Kazakhstan;
-
began collecting and processing requests for lawyers, guides, and translators.
Over time, our websites evolved from a student project into a profitable business that allowed us to pay for our studies and enjoy a comfortable student life. This was my first experience, which essentially taught me how to “walk” in the IT field.
— How did the projects develop after you returned to Kazakhstan?
— I wanted to scale them to other countries and seek support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But that didn’t work out—the Ministry already had its own plans for developing information portals.
However, the experience with travel websites gave us an understanding of how internet traffic algorithms and SEO work. We used this knowledge to launch new e-commerce projects. We created niche websites in various areas—beauty, sports, fitness devices—and brought them to the top of search results. It was around that time, in 2015, that I met my current co-founder and CTO, Eduard Zaukarnaev. Since then, he has been responsible for the technical side of all our projects.
Our success with e-commerce projects attracted investors, who allocated $600,000 and предложили запустить полноценный маркетплейс. That’s how Kupi.kz appeared—a portal with more than 120,000 product listings and over 500 orders per day at its peak. It was a major success.
However, due to internal organizational problems that negatively affected the entire team’s performance, we decided to shut the project down. For me, a 25-year-old at the time, this was psychologically very difficult. Such rapid growth—and then being abruptly brought back down to earth.
Read more on Digitalbusiness.kz.
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