Starting a company can be a complicated process that requires special knowledge. To make it easier for you, we share the stories of IT entrepreneurs from Kyrgyzstan. They shared their experiences and key aspects of the process.
Nurgazy Sulaimanov, city — Bishkek, Co-Founder Geeks, @sulaimanov_nurgazy
About myself
I was born in a family of teachers in the Nookat district of Kyrgyz-Ata village, Osh province. I graduated from the school-gymnasium in my village. I got higher education in two specialities: economist and lawyer. I also studied in Austria, Korea and Japan.
Then I worked in the civil service for eight years: in the Ministry of Economy, the Government Office of the Kyrgyz Republic. I worked my way up from an ordinary specialist to the head of department and minister's assistant. While working at the Ministry of Economy, I communicated with developers and learnt a lot of interesting things about programming. I became fascinated by this field and started looking for IT courses.
There were no suitable courses at that time, so my partner Aidar Bakirov and I decided to create our own Geeks programming courses. After the launch, I also took Android development training and in the third month, I received a job offer with a salary of $300. This inspired me, as despite eight years of experience in the civil service, my salary was the same.
I decided to fully focus on developing Geeks. Since childhood, I had a dream to serve my country and this was a great opportunity to do good by developing a network of IT courses. Since 2018, we have graduated and employed over 2000 students. We continue to educate IT specialists not only in Kyrgyzstan but also beyond its borders: we recently opened our first office in Tashkent.
About the project
We create an ecosystem for aspiring IT professionals, teaching adults and children from the age of seven programming, design, testing and other IT skills from scratch. After completing the courses, we offer the Geeks Pro internship programme and help them find employment with over 25 partner companies, including our own IT company GeekStudio.
Geeks is six years old now. We have four branches — in Bishkek, Osh, Kara-Balta and Tashkent. In total, more than 1000 students study at Geeks, and 2000 graduates are employed in 50 local and foreign companies.
Our goal is to provide everyone with an opportunity to master a modern IT profession with guaranteed results using a unique educational system. We strive to help people to live with dignity and earn a high income.
How to start an IT company
IT business is not different from other types of businesses. In our case, we are engaged in training and development of IT products, mainly for the Kyrgyz market. Therefore, we needed to register as a legal entity with the Ministry of Justice of the Kyrgyz Republic. Optionally, it is possible to obtain a licence from the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic, which will allow us to provide graduates with state certificates upon completion of the courses.
There is also an opportunity for IT companies to become residents of the High Technology Park of Kyrgyzstan if more than 80 per cent of their revenue is exported. HTP residents are provided with good tax benefits from the state. Unfortunately, at the moment we cannot become a resident of the Park, as the company's export share is about 20% of its revenue.
Support for IT companies
The Cabinet of Ministers of the Kyrgyz Republic is currently working on supporting IT business. Last year, the Law On the Park of Creative Industries was adopted, which provides for significant preferences for the IT sphere. For example, instead of paying income tax, VAT and EPT, a system of quarterly taxation on revenue is established for residents of the CIP: in 2023 and 2024 – 0.5%, in 2025 and 2026 – 1%, and from 2027 – 2%. Employees of PKI residents pay 12 per cent of insurance premiums on their average monthly salary. We hope that this law will be operational this year.
Human resources market
There is always a big lack of qualified staff in the IT field. We solve this problem in the following way: we train people from scratch at Geeks, consolidate their skills with the Geeks Pro internship programme and employ the best interns in our own IT company GeekStudio, while the rest are recommended to our 25 partners. Having an IT company in our armoury, we always know what kind of staff the market needs and can launch new courses with confidence. For example, we recently closed our vacancies by launching a course on IT project management and software testing.
In recruiting, word of mouth is especially valuable. In some IT departments of large banks, more than half of the developers are our graduates. In the beginning, one of them gets a job in the company, and then the others follow his recommendation.
Professional community
Despite the rapid growth in the number of IT specialists, we have not yet seen a centralised and large community of IT entrepreneurs in Kyrgyzstan.
What is missing
Although we are growing fast by our country's standards, we are not fast enough by global standards. There is a lack of investment to accelerate growth. Over the years we have been actively working on packaging our franchise product with our online platform and on 10 February we launched our first foreign franchise branch in Tashkent.
Now we have a task to speed up this process, for which we need resources and funds. There are a lot of plans and ideas.
Dina Ruslan, city – Bishkek, CEO & Founder CODIFY, @dinaruslan00
About myself
I graduated from the Department of Energy Engineering in college and the Department of Information Technology in university. I got a red diploma as a programmer-analyst and worked for one year in Afghanistan to pay for my master's studies in the USA.
I spent sleepless nights in front of the computer, working in the IT field without a day off for over eight years. The decision to end a successful IT career in the US with a salary of $7000 per month and start building a startup called Codify was bewildering to those around me. But I realised my goal.
About the project
CODIFY is my dream:
— dream — to train young people for the IT professions of the future and help them find jobs
— dream — to help educational centres scale up
— dream — to help founders build IT products
— dream — to build Unicorn.
CODIFY is a group of IT companies with a total valuation of $6,000,000. We help:
— to train children and teenagers in IT professions within Codify Academy, Codify Teens
— IT training and internships for adults in Codify Lab
— find a suitable online job and learn project management through Lets Codify
— automate learning processes and scale education centre courses and online courses within CodifyLMS
— develop IT projects and products for startups and businesses from around the world as part of Codify Lab
How to start an IT company
Starting a company is easy. It only takes a couple of days to collect and prepare the documents, and then you can join the High Technology Park to register in a special tax zone. Detailed advice and information is available on the HTP website.
Support for IT companies
We have the High Tech Park, which provides special tax treatment. Of course, it would be great to have more programmes for the development of startups.
Human resources market
Earlier there was a huge shortage of developers, but now I notice that what is most lacking are marketing specialists, project managers, sales specialists, sales managers, and most importantly, specialists who can package IT products attractively and sell them successfully.
We have been actively looking for marketers and sales specialists for several months now, but we are still unable to fill these vacancies. We used to find it difficult to close all our IT vacancies, but then we created a free employment platform called Job Codify And now we close all IT jobs within one month.
In addition to marketers and project managers, we have been looking for financial analysts, and specialists able to work with IT data and finance for a long time, but we haven't found them either.
Professional community
In 2023, we developed a programme to support startup founders: Startup Nation, where we actively help each other. A variety of hackathons and IT events were held to support aspiring startups, with more than 500 teams participating. This is just the beginning. We continue to develop.
From 1 to 3 March, we will hold the Startup Nation hackathon, which will bring together 40 top startup founders with successful international projects. They will share their experience with aspiring startups.
Among the participants will be representatives of such countries as Kazakhstan — Qalan KZ, UAE — founder of Veles finance and Kyrgyzstan — founder of Namba Group and others.
What is missing
Previously, there was a lack of environment and knowledge from active startup founders. However, thanks to other entrepreneurs willing to openly share their knowledge and experience, we have everything we need.
I would like to express my gratitude to startup founders who voluntarily and free of charge share their knowledge with aspiring startups as part of the Startup Nation programme. I would especially like to mention the founders of Qalan kz, Veles Finance, NBFit, Namba, FinBook, Sixbox, Altos, BeFree, Laletty and others.
