Tourism Startup · Almaty · 2023
In December 2016 KG Labs ran a tourism hackathon in Bishkek with mentors from Estonia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. Seven years later, one of those mentors — Leonid Pustov — is in Almaty hosting Travel Massive with the community’s founder Ian Cumming. The Central Asian tourism-startup ecosystem grew out of relationships like that.
2023-07-25 · Aziz Soltobaev · KG Labs Foundation
In December 2016, KG Labs Public Foundation ran a hackathon focused on the tourism sector of Kyrgyzstan. We brought in mentors from Estonia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan to help local founders produce credible tourism-startup projects across the weekend. One of those mentors was Leonid Pustov — at the time, a driver of the Russian travel-startup community, with deep relationships across the regional tourism-tech ecosystem.
Seven years later, in July 2023, Leonid and I met again in Bishkek and exchanged updates on what each of us had been building. The conversation moved naturally to the wider Central Asian tourism-startup ecosystem and to what it would take, at this point, to give it the connective tissue that the Russian and Estonian equivalents have had for a decade.
What we exchanged
The specific exchange — and the reason I am writing this — was about the work I had been carrying through the Sanarip Insan project, in particular the digital-tourism video set the project produced in Russian and Kyrgyz on the request of the Ministry of Culture, Information, and Tourism of the Kyrgyz Republic.
The videos cover, in plain language for a non-technical audience, what the different digital platforms actually do for a tourism business — Booking.com, Airbnb, Google Maps, the various social-media platforms — and how a small operator in Naryn, in Aksy, in Issyk-Kul, or in Talas can use them to reach international travellers without needing a marketing budget. The full playlist sits at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMi3cAj2tpBzyzuFe6WCg20P9kAuDh5SZ.
What Leonid wanted to know — and what the wider regional Travel Massive community would find useful — was whether the material could be adapted for use by similar small operators in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan, and in Tajikistan. The principles are the same; the platforms are the same; the language and the local context are the parts that need to be customised. We agreed to make the source material available to anyone in the regional community who wanted to do that adaptation.
That is the kind of regional-community work that does not show up in startup-event materials. It is not a hackathon. It is not a launch. It is the long-form relationship between two people who met at a Bishkek hackathon in 2016 and have stayed in touch enough that the next round of useful work can be coordinated by phone.
The Almaty Travel Massive meetup
The proximate occasion for Leonid being in the region was the Travel Massive Almaty meetup the next day — 26 July 2023. Travel Massive is a global community of tourism-industry professionals; its founder Ian Cumming had flown in from Tasmania for the meetup and to spend time across the regional ecosystem.
The Travel Massive format works similarly across cities: a couple of hours of structured introductions, a few short presentations from local operators and startups, and a long open networking session that produces the connections the formal programme cannot anticipate. The Almaty edition was the first concrete instance of the community taking shape in Central Asia — meaningful for the regional travel ecosystem, because most of the international tourism-startup conversation runs through cities like Lisbon, Singapore, or Cape Town and does not stop in Almaty, Bishkek, or Tashkent on the way.
Background on the meetup: https://www.travelmassive.com/events/almaty-travel-massive-2-with-special-guests-and-startup-pitches-8111562587.
Background on Travel Massive as a global community: https://www.travelmassive.com/.
Background on the 2016 KG Labs tourism hackathon that started this thread: https://kaktus.media/doc/348324_hackathon_travel_tourism._eksperty_iz_estonii_rossii_i_kyrgyzstana.html.
What I want to mark, looking back
The thing I want to record from the July 2023 conversation is that the Central Asian tourism-startup ecosystem grew, where it has grown, out of personal relationships seeded by specific events. The 2016 KG Labs hackathon was one of those events. Seven years on from that weekend, the relationships from it are still producing work — including, through Sanarip Insan, the digital-tourism video set that the Ministry now uses and that is being adapted regionally.
Most of the work that determines whether a regional ecosystem exists or does not exist is exactly this kind: long-form, relational, asynchronous, hard to measure on a Demo Day stage. It is the part of the work that funders and policy reports tend to miss. It is also the part that does the most to build the connective tissue that converts isolated founders into a functioning regional industry.
The next Travel Massive meetup in the region, the next KG Labs tourism event, the next conversation between a Bishkek founder and a Russian or Estonian or Tasmanian mentor — those are the moments where the Central Asian tourism ecosystem either grows or does not. Leonid and Ian being in Almaty in July 2023 was one of those moments. There will be more. I want to make sure the next ones happen on purpose, not by accident.