“When we share the stories of our mistakes, there will be much fewer failures.”

This is exactly how the co-founder of the unique online group communication service Spatial Chat, the author of the Venture by Concepts Telegram channel, our compatriot Almas Abulkhairov, began his speech.

For the first time in a long time, an offline meeting was held at Astana Hub. The audience, which missed the live events, eagerly listened to the speaker and was in a hurry to ask their question.

The coronavirus pandemic, which caused damage to some areas, unexpectedly helped to “shoot” new ideas. This is what happened with the Spatial Chat project, which has experienced 16 failures since 2016, and finally found a second life at the beginning of 2020. Today, the application has 400,000 active monthly users from the US, Europe, Japan, Brazil and other countries. The feature of the service is that users can move freely from one speaker to another, participating in several discussions in parallel.

Having lived in Moscow for several years and having experience of cooperation with European and American companies, Almas notes the advantages of developing a startup from Kazakhstan.

• I call it “Kazakh operating system”. Our school education is unique because we teach in 3 languages at once. This is a huge plus. In addition, the attitude towards Kazakhstan and Kazakhstanis abroad is extremely positive, which I have seen more than once.

The meeting participants talked about the benefits of dating and the importance of delegating responsibilities between salespeople and engineers.

• It must be remembered that the success of any enterprise depends 50% on technology, and 50% on marketing policy. In the case of Spatial Chat, this proportion is 51 and 49% in favor of sales.

“The main thing is not what we have, but what we can do with what we have,” Almas summed up the dialogue platform with novice startups.

Recall that all participants of the international technopark of IT start-ups Astana Hub receive tax preferences. Preferences exempt participants from paying taxes such as CIT, VAT, VAT on imports of goods, royalty tax, PIT and social tax for non-residents. Such a measure of state support allows IT companies to reinvest the saved funds in the development of their projects.