Selling an AI platform to schools, WONK
As Chief Operating Officer of WONK, an Astana Hub ed-tech startup, I led B2B sales of its AI education platform, opened the route into state schools through public procurement, ran onboarding and delivery, and built the AI systems that draft the company's proposals.
120+ schools in five months, KZT 150m in revenue
Role
Chief Operating Officer, WONK.
Outcome
- 120+ schools signed in five months
- KZT 150m (c. USD 330k) in revenue
- archive.alfais.uk live
Constraints
- State schools buy only through goszakup, Kazakhstan's public procurement portal, which needs a technical specification, a contract template and pricing before a single sale
- Five months from a product to paying schools
- A small team responsible for onboarding and delivery
Process
- Prepared the product's technical specification, the contract template and the pricing for procurement.
- Led B2B sales and negotiated contracts with schools; managed the team that onboarded and delivered them.
- Built a six-agent AI system with document retrieval that drafts commercial proposals and marketing strategy documents.
- Built and deployed a Russian/Kazakh archive search demo (archive.alfais.uk): hybrid full-text and vector search, answers with citations, a scanned-page viewer.