TOYSHI, ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN

The client's money: on the table, upfront. The vendor's money: in hand, right after the event.

On Kazakhstan's event market, half of all agreements still run on a handshake instead of paper, so vendors end up waiting weeks for money they're already owed. Toyshi changes exactly that.

Toyshi is a working title for the project during development; it will be replaced before the production launch.

01The Problem

The market's biggest pain isn't logistics at all

We ran 20+ interviews with vendors across Kazakhstan's event market, and the same four pain points surfaced in every single one: the order shifted from conversation to conversation, but the set stayed the same, and all four were always there.

$30 000
Trust
A vendor takes a deposit and disappears, and verbal agreements get rewritten after the fact: according to one vendor who works with Ritz-Carlton Almaty and clients like Philip Morris, Carlsberg, and Unilever, one such debt was never recovered.
30–45 days
Money
That's the typical wait for the remaining balance after an event, and in catering these delays happen in roughly 80% of cases, which forces production vendors to run on their own working capital.
×2
Accounting
That's how much the myBook accounting service cost one leading vendor after a single year, and with corporate clients making up 30% of the business, staying on it simply stopped making sense.
~40%
Timing
Decorators regularly miss their setup deadlines, and any delay can wipe out the entire point of the event, no matter how carefully the rest of the script was planned.

Personal experience: A saxophonist was told to be at the entrance at exactly 9 a.m. on March 8th to greet the female staff with music, but he showed up at 10, by which point most people had already taken their seats, and the one moment he'd been hired for simply never happened.

02What we learned from other people's mistakes

A catalog doesn't remove the pain of choosing, it makes it worse

One event marketplace in Kazakhstan launched in 2021 with a team of 16 and shut down by 2023, not for lack of vendors but for lack of frequency: an event happens once a year in a person's life, while a catalog needs the habit of coming back again and again. The marketplace added choice to the market, but it never took away the weight of making that choice.

Toyshi is built on the opposite principle: not a catalog you browse and compare, but delegation of that whole job to the platform.

03The Solution

One feature closes both main pain points

An AI assistant together with a builder puts an event together in a few steps while staying within the set budget, and every agreement is recorded right in the platform instead of staying a verbal promise, the way it works on the market today.

Client
Pays the full amount upfront, in one payment
Vendor
Gets their share almost right after the event, instead of waiting the usual 30–45 days

The product hasn't launched yet: everything described above has been validated in 20+ conversations with vendors and organizers, not in real transactions, and that's worth keeping in mind.

04Who we're building this for

Small and mid-size businesses, private clients

Our client is a small or mid-size company organizing an event for employees or clients, or an everyday person putting together a celebration for themselves or their family. We're not counting large corporations: they already have agencies. For small businesses and private clients, an agency is often simply unaffordable, while doing everything yourself costs a lot of time and nerves.

05The Market

$1.1B — and that's just the floor for Kazakhstan

Metric Estimate Source
TAM - global event industry market $1.46T (2026) Custom Market Insights
TAM - Kazakhstan, weddings only ~$1.1B/year 115,900 weddings × $8–11K average budget
SAM - Almaty + Astana, weddings and private events ~$750M/year 68.1% of weddings are urban
SAM - Almaty + Astana, small and mid-size business ~75–95K companies Estimated from SME count in Kazakhstan, needs validation
SOM - year 1 100–300 first clients Team estimate, bootstrap scenario
06Business Model

Five revenue streams

Stream Rate Details
Vendor commission 5–15% Venue rentals 5–15%, vendors 10%
Service fee $15–300+ Flat fee, scales with event size
Subscription MRR Access to private events and guides
Fintech margin bps Share from installment partners
Sponsorship integrations Flat fee Brand placements within event scripts
07Team & Stage

Three partners, discovery already done

Role Commitment
Roman Dyakonov - CPO Equity, full-time
Alexey Fokin - CTO Equity, full-time
Alexey Bayev - event industry expert Equity, part-time
Designer Part-time
DevOps Part-time
Mid-level developer Part-time

Alongside Toyshi, Alexey Bayev also runs Bayev Group, an event and communications agency in Almaty.

$5.8К
monthly burn, bootstrap scenario
20+
discovery interviews completed