Female Startup: EasyStep — a training platform for IT specialists

The Female Startup column continues to acquaint readers with successful projects of the Central Asian countries that took part in the Tumaris.Tech program.

The hero of the column is CEO of the EasyStep project, 39-year-old Asel Seifullina from Kazakhstan. In an interview with IT Park, she told what inspired her in her work, what difficulties she had to overcome, and how Tumaris.Tech helped in working on a startup.

How did it all start?

Assel Seifullina is the founder of the YasDiEducation center, tracker, senior lecturer at KazATU named after S. Seifullin.

She has been working in the field of education for more than 20 years, teaching IT subjects both at the university and in her training center.

“Many years of work in the field of education helped me to see many gaps within the industry.  I often see that there is a problem between what the employer wants to see and what training methods are currently used.  Over the course of the year, I observed what products EdTech projects were offering to the market and intuitively felt what was missing from them.  This is how the idea of ​​creating a platform like EasyStep was born”.

Now the startup team has 6 members, all of them are specialists with extensive experience in system administration, marketing, and education:

• Asel Seifullina – CEO, IQBBA Certified Business Analyst, founder of the YasdiEducation center, tracker, developer of Flutter Flow, senior lecturer at KazATU named after S. Seifullin with more than 20 years of experience, in IT for 10 years;

• Denis Konarev – DevOps, certified Linux specialist: LPIC (Linux Professional Institute Certification), and twice RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator);
• Yerkebulan Jappar – CTO, Senior low code Flutter Flow developer;
• Zarina Bayzen – Project Manager, project ambassador at her university, 3rd year student in the specialty “Business Informatics” KazATU named after S. Seifullin
• Konstantin Nasonov – CMO, founder of the international marketing agency JustUP;

• Meerim Kubatova – Regional Director for Kyrgyzstan, Investment Analyst, Global Initiative of the Aga Khan Development Network.

What benefits does a startup bring to society?

EasyStep is an innovative solution that trains IT specialists. This is a platform for an accelerated entry into the IT field in a couple of clicks, presented as a web and mobile application. All participants of the process meet here: student, graduate, expert and employer.

The startup contributes to the digitalization of society and the growth of the economic well-being of the participants in the process.

This solution:

•  increases the conversion of employment of IT-specialists;
•  blurs the boundaries between the employer, experts and students;
•  allows experts to monetize their skills;
•  improves student achievement;
•  helps with career guidance.

Now the startup is at the stage of active development.

“I think that development is going quite fast. The number of users is growing, we already have sales and plans to enter the global market before the end of this year.

In March 2023, I was lucky to meet my investor partner, together with him we are already creating a separate project for Kazakhstan with the EasyStep Kazakhstan brand”.

How did you deal with difficulties?

The most difficult thing in working on the project, Assel admits, was finding a balance between works that were close and at the same time not losing focus.

“I won’t say that everything was easy. But thanks to the excellent Tumaris Tech II program, many issues were resolved immediately at the training seminars. I was very happy to participate in such a program, thanks to which I was able to accurately describe the value proposition for my project and build a working business model around it, as well as access the educational environment and networking”.

Today, the guest of the column notes, the startup ecosystem in Kazakhstan is quite developed, there are a lot of different programs, grants, competitions that contribute to the growing interest of the younger generation in creating their own unique projects. Therefore, anyone can develop their product.

“I am often asked the question: what niches should a startupper definitely not go into today?  Still, I am more of the opinion that the idea is in 5th place, the founder himself is more important.  As a rule, all the limitations lie not in the project or the market itself, but in the head of the founder”.

Startups have many advantages, and first of all, it is the freedom of creativity.

“I love that sense of creativity.  You create something new, useful, you get a lot of experience in several areas at once, such as Product Management, entrepreneurship, etc.  I would like to appeal to novice startuppers: when you create a project, in fact, you create a child who needs to be looked after, who needs to be developed and promoted.  The most important thing is to believe in yourself and your strengths, work out the limitations in yourself and grow further.  And then everything will certainly work out!”