Digital Camp IT-Academy — a startup that presents an innovative online learning platform

Fuzail Zoirov, 26 years old, city — Tashkent, CEO, @fuzailzoirov

How It All Started

I have been working in the IT sector since 2015. I was involved in game development, business automation, and other projects.

In 2021, the IT sector in Uzbekistan began to develop rapidly. New companies were opening, and there was a shortage of programmers. A friend of mine had his own technology company, and he also felt that there were few qualified professionals in the market. At the same time, many acquaintances became interested in the IT sector and asked where they could get trained. At this intersection of interests, Azimkhon Khudayberdiev and I decided to create an IT academy that would train programmers from scratch.

For the launch, we were looking for premises and learned that Akmal Payziev, the founder of startups MyTaxi and Express24, was opening an IT hub — IMPACT.T. We decided that this was a great location for our academy, and during the negotiations, we attracted investments from Akmal Payziev himself.

Target Audience

Digital Camp IT-Academy started accepting its first students in February 2022. Three months later, we noticed two interesting facts. First: most of our students are school students aged 12-16. They have more motivation to learn and different expectations from the courses. Second: students aged 18-25 often change their motivation. A convenient format for them is online learning, where the mentor records lessons, and the user watches them at their convenience.

Therefore, we moved the learning process online, and for students aged 10-16, we launched CoddyCamp IT-Academy, which focused on teaching children. This way, we were able to provide the necessary courses for each audience in a convenient format.

The learning process is fully automated. The lessons are structured so that students do not need a mentor, so the load on the teacher is minimal. 70% of students complete the training on their own.

After moving online, we started accepting students from all over Uzbekistan. This gives young people from the regions the opportunity to become programmers while staying at home. Every day, we see stories of factory workers, nurses, or clothing sellers deciding to learn modern professions. This motivates us to improve and launch new courses.

Acceleration Programs

We have not yet gone through incubation or acceleration programs. At this stage, it would distract us from the process, as there are many tasks, and there is not enough time for everything.

At the beginning of the journey, a mentor is very important. We often discuss plans and results with Akmal Payziev. He points out mistakes that we would not have noticed on our own, contributing to our growth.

Challenges

The main challenge is building a team. At the beginning, a startup needs people with enthusiasm, ready to do many different tasks simultaneously, risking time for an interesting project. There are few such people in Uzbekistan. Especially when you cannot yet offer a market salary. We were lucky: we were in the center of the IT community at IMPACT.T, so we assembled a good team.

When scaling and growing the team, it is important to establish management processes. You need people who can manage other people.

We managed to overcome both difficulties: currently, more than 60 specialists work in the company.

Achievements

We are developing CoddyCamp IT-Academy. We teach children aged 7-17 programming and IT skills in an offline format. Today, we have 3 branches and more than 500 students. In January 2024, we opened the third and largest branch, where about 1000 students will be able to study.

The most important thing for our students is that they create practical projects that they show to their parents and friends. Last year, for the first time in Uzbekistan, we held two hackathons for children and awarded the best startup projects.

To improve the learning process, we are working on the next version of the educational platform with new features — personalized learning, gamification, AI mentors, and so on.

Personalized learning will allow students to adjust their plan depending on the degree of material mastery. And gamification will help retain and increase student engagement.

Plans

Digital Camp IT-Academy is an IT academy where training is conducted online on an educational platform. Course mentors are experienced programmers, and the course program is developed by methodologists. More than 500 students are studying, and 85% of graduates have already found jobs.

Our plans for this year are to increase the total number of students to 3000, add new courses, and move all students to the new educational platform.