Personal Assistant for Applicants: Interview with JOO.KZ

What is JOO.kz for? What are its functions (besides searching data on admissions)?

• Joo.kz is a personal assistant for applicants. The Joo.kz mobile app has everything you need:

1. Information about universities and majors. The "Professions" section is integrated with hh.kz. There you can see the average salary and real-time demand, as well as current vacancies for the chosen major.

2. Predictive analytics. Based on the selected profile subjects and ENU (Unified National Testing) score, you can analyze your chances of getting a scholarship. This helps applicants decide on their choice of 4 universities and majors in the scholarship distribution competition.

3. Weekly mock tests. As a result of the test, the applicant receives an analysis of incorrectly answered questions, topic analysis, and can see their ranking among other applicants.

4. Adaptive learning. The applicant receives an individual preparation plan for the ENU. The smart plan adapts to the student depending on their current level, their goal, and their learning speed.

Everything in the app is free, except for the learning section.

How does the app work? Where does the information come from? How up-to-date is it?

• We are an official partner of the National Testing Center. We receive all the necessary up-to-date information about majors and passing scores from them. Applicants can view their ENU results and scholarship competition results in our app, receiving information via push notifications.

How did the idea for creating the app come to you?

• I have been working in the education sector for over 15 years. I have always been closely connected with applicants and knew their pain points. Applicants ask the same questions every year. I thought that a platform was needed that would solve all the pain points and problems of applicants.

How is the startup financed?

• We have long been operating at a profit. Moreover, we are now actively scaling into adjacent niches and other countries.

Did you attract investors?

• Yes, we attracted two rounds of investment, pre-seed and seed rounds, totaling about $500,000 from the IT company Robi Group and the Farabi Capital fund.

Will there be monetization of the app?

• Yes, as mentioned earlier, our learning section is paid. We prepare applicants for the ENU on a paid basis.

How many people have downloaded the app since its inception? What is the average rating, and was it in the top charts of app stores?

• Over its entire lifetime, our app has been downloaded by about 350,000 people. The average rating is 4.7 out of 5. We have always been in the Top, especially during the summer period. This is because in the summer, during the scholarship competition, Joo.kz is in high demand among applicants. By the end of July (during the scholarship competition) last year, the average number of users checking their scholarship chances was 50,000 people, and the total number of scholarship searches was over 450,000.

Tell us about partnerships with Kazakhstani universities, and what is the practical benefit for applicants?

• We cooperate with leading universities in Kazakhstan. These universities offer their internal scholarships to our students. For example, this year we are distributing 50 internal scholarships from our partners among our students.

At what stage is your startup?

• We are currently scaling into other countries. For example, we will soon launch in Russia. Our project vuzline.ru is the Russian analog of Joo.kz. We are also opening offline centers in 5 cities in Kazakhstan with hybrid learning. About 5,000 applicants are studying with us. The average check is 100,000 tenge per year. Our goal is to train 10,000 applicants this academic year.

What difficulties did you face along the way?

• When creating a startup, you always have to overcome various difficulties. When we started developing the mobile app, the pandemic began. This introduced its own corrections to our plans. We launched with a slight delay because we were working remotely for the first time, and it was very difficult.

What are your further plans?

• We are always in the process of improvement. For example, we are improving algorithms and adding gamification tools. We are also personalizing the news feed. Speaking of other markets, we have already entered the Russian market. Since the pain points of applicants there are similar, and the market is tens of times larger than ours.