Yaya: subscription for kids activities in Kazakhstan

Biography

Laura Yerayileva is the founder of Yaya, a Kazakh startup offering an all-in-one membership for kids activities. By purchasing a Yaya subscription, parents get access to over 600+ kids activities including sports, arts and education. 

Founded in 2022, Yaya surpassed $2M in revenue last year. They have raised a little over $250K from 500 Global and local angel investors.

What problem are you solving?

Before founding Yaya, I worked at ChocoFamily, one of Kazakhstan's largest tech companies. I was part of the hospitality vertical, building digital loyalty programs for restaurants.

After ChocoFamily, I launched an online nanny marketplace. I built it out of my own struggle to find quality nannies for my child. It was a difficult business: highly operational, constant interaction with nannies and parents… It wasn’t scalable so I decided to pivot.

As I closed down the nanny marketplace, I realized that kid centers (sport clubs, art clubs, afterschool tutoring) had similar tech challenges than my clients at ChocoFamily. They desperately needed digital tools, for scheduling, billing, marketing…

Simultaneously, I conducted interviews with the parent clients I had. Many told me they struggled to find good kid centers. When they did find one, they were at risk of buying a subscription only for their child to stop wanting to go 3 days in. 

I wondered what product could help both the kids’ centers and the parents. That’s Yaya’s genesis.

What did your MVP look like?

Yaya is an annual membership, via which parents have access to various kid centers under that single subscription. No need to pay for each individual one. Kid centers plug into the app and parents can book slots from there. 

Our MVP was simple. We had one team manually onboarding kid centers onto our database (an Excel sheet). We had another team manually selling subscriptions to parents. Since we didn’t have an app yet, parents told our team which centers they wanted to book and we’d call the center to book for them. As Paul Graham said: do things that don’t scale. 

How does the subscription’s unit economics work out?

A year pass costs around $1,000. We’ve partnered with local banks (Halyk and Kaspi) to offer a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) option. BNPL (and digital banking services more broadly) have grown extremely popular in Kazakhstan over the past few years. 

We negotiate a discounted price with kid centers. Our value proposition is that we help them fill their slots by exposing them to new clients. We pay the kid center that discounted price anytime a Yaya client books and uses a slot. 

The unit economics are straightforward: our annual pass has to cost more than the visits a Yaya client makes. Today, our average margin on the passes is 10% but we’re working to increase it to 40%. 

Source: Kazakhstan Fintech Report 2024

How can you increase that margin?