This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 26, 2021 - May 2, 2021

Nurbek Jusupov is at an interesting crossroads in his career as a tech entrepreneur. 

On the one hand, he has spent the last decade building, growing and maintaining EasyUni, along with co-founder Edwin Tay. EasyUni is a Malaysia-headquartered higher education aggregator service with footprints in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. 

The business has grown at a consistent tick, and this gives Jusupov the distinction of being one of relatively few tech bosses who have found success and stability as a first-time entrepreneur. A product of a student exchange programme between Kyrgyzstan and Malaysia in the 1990s, Jusupov has lived and worked here for many years now. 

On the other hand, the pandemic has forced him and his team to either adapt or fall away entirely. Earlier this year, EasyUni launched a service called FairWiz, a cloud-based software suite that provides online-only fairs and exhibition services to enterprise clients. 

In a strange twist of events, it seems the Covid-19 pandemic has turned FairWiz and, by extension, EasyUni, under which FairWiz is parked, into a bit of a high-growth business. 

Demand for FairWiz’ online-only event hosting capabilities has, in a very short span of time, taken Jusupov far beyond his original focus on the higher education ecosystem. 

“When we first launched FairWiz earlier this year, it was supposed to complement EasyUni because to us, the synergies were obvious. The entire idea, in fact, came from one of our EasyUni university clients. They had approached us and asked us to host an ‘online open day’ for them, which of course we obliged,” Jusupov tells Digital Edge. 

In hosting that particular event, Jusupov saw the potential for offering this as a dedicated service to institutions of higher learning. But soon, demand started to pour in from other sources as well. 

From online open days, he found himself fielding enquiries to host online job fairs, which then got him connected to private businesses outside education. Before Jusupov knew it, FairWiz was being deployed to host an international trade and exhibition fair for the Mecca Chamber of Commerce, halfway across the world. 

“We’ve been contacted by a state government in that area to possibly host an online trade exhibition for the region’s farming industry. 

“We continue to be surprised by all the creative and interesting ways that our clients find to make use of FairWiz. We certainly did not anticipate using FairWiz to host trade shows in the Middle East when we first launched the service. 

“A lot of these offbeat use cases were a result of prospective clients reaching out to us and enquiring about our capabilities with FairWiz.” 

And herein lies the dilemma. As a relatively small tech firm, having been through just two major funding rounds over the last decade, does the company now have a new flagship product in FairWiz? And if so, does that mean EasyUni’s days are numbered? 

Jusupov acknowledges that FairWiz is the company’s major product right now. He is adopting a “strike while the iron is hot” mentality with regard to FairWiz and the runaway success it has enjoyed.

He intends to continue providing the FairWiz service for the long term and is continually updating it with new features and capabilities, as and when he receives orders from various industries. 

The matter of EasyUni’s fate, meanwhile, is a little more complicated and perhaps very personal for Jusupov. He accepts the fact that FairWiz’s growth rate over the last few months has far outpaced anything EasyUni has seen over the last decade. And while he has given it some thought, Jusupov is not prepared to make a hard pivot just yet. 

“EasyUni will continue in its current iteration, but obviously, we can’t know what the future holds. It might make sense to spin off FairWiz into a separate legal entity on its own, but for now, we’re just laser-focused on building on the momentum that we’ve generated around FairWiz these last few months.

“EasyUni is very meaningful to me because it brought me such great relationships and successes in servicing the higher education sector over the last 10 years. 

“But the thing about aggregator services like these is that they are incredibly resource-intensive, especially if you have ambitions to turn it into a world-spanning brand, like TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, or even Grab, for that matter. 

“To get to the point where the market recognises your value and exponentially piles into your service, you first need to have spent huge amounts of money to catalyse a lot of activity and stickiness to the service.”

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