Sergey Kapustin: Innovation in the Online Education Market

The online education market is experiencing unprecedented growth. According to a forecast by Spherical Insights, the market is expected to surpass $180 billion by 2030. Among the leaders in this niche are the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries, where Sergey Kapustin, an expert in online education and a successful businessman, has been at the forefront of the movement.

Sergey Kapustin’s journey in this field began in 2010 when he co-founded Business-Molodost with his partners — a project that later became Russia’s largest offline two-month business course on starting an online business. Kapustin exited the project in 2013, by which time it had enrolled over 100,000 students.

In 2011 Sergei Kapustin established an info-incubator aimed at training online school owners. “At that time, the online education sector in the CIS was virtually non-existent. The rise of Instagram indicated to experts that they could become sought-after online, but the question remained: how could they achieve this? On one hand, there was widespread distrust of this learning format; on the other, there were no established methodologies or foundations for online teaching,” Sergey Kapustin explains. “As each expert attempted to promote their product, they relied more on personal vision than on proven business strategies.”

Kapustin spent considerable time observing this niche, analyzing methods employed in the American online market. His extensive experience in a marketing agency helped him develop a system of metrics that enabled him to evaluate the effectiveness of various sales tactics. From this analysis, Sergey Kapustin discovered that certain Western tools were ineffective in the CIS. Consequently, he adapted these methods to the local market, proposing his own algorithms for online promotion and sales.

Through the info-incubator, Sergey Kapustin took on a challenging task: to create a mechanism that would empower experts in any niche to successfully launch their own products. Over time, he structured all his developments into a comprehensive system for operating an online school. He established essential departments for successful product development and launch, proposed various promotion methods, created a system for structuring information, and provided a clear algorithm for experts to follow within the product. At that time, no such approach existed anywhere in the world. Western experts mainly worked independently or utilized automated sales funnels, whereas Sergey Kapustin was the first to offer a holistic approach to online product development.

In 2016, Sergey Kapustin co-founded the online astrology institute “Lakshmi-Ameya.” The promotion system he developed was now applied to a specific product and functioned flawlessly, generating up to $2 million in annual revenue. He implemented all the necessary technologies, either adapting them for the CIS market or creating them from scratch. Over the years, the school gained consistent popularity. The first graduating class comprised about 100 students, but that number has grown each year. In just five years, the student body expanded to 4,000–5,000 annually. The project quickly gained international reach, spanning 15 countries. At “Lakshmi-Ameya,” Sergey Kapustin managed all business processes and eventually became the sole owner of the online institute.

In 2017, Sergey Kapustin introduced a new business format. Together with a partner, he created Accel, an Accelerator for online schools. The strategies developed by Sergey Kapustin enabled online educational products in various niches, from fitness to the exact sciences, to become profitable.

The accelerator program lasted one year and provided support at every stage, even assisting in bringing the project to market. During this period, students received the tools necessary to launch their online schools: templates for sales pages, emails, and ads, as well as sales scripts, course settings, methodologies for creating courses, and strategies for finding partners. Clear steps were outlined for transitioning offline schools to the internet and expanding their operations. To enhance customer engagement, Sergey Kapustin developed a gamification system, allowing students to earn points as they progressed through all stages of building their online school. Accel offered a unique data tracking and client management system, centralizing all operations, including a proprietary payment system.

Sergey Kapustin views the info-incubator and the Accel Accelerator, built on its foundation, as the most significant projects not only for himself but for the entire entrepreneurial community of the CIS. Accel revolutionized the market, serving as a springboard for businesses transitioning online. It became one of the most prominent projects in online education within the CIS, and Sergey Kapustin showcased it at major Russian forums, addressing audiences ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 people. He was invited for interviews by notable figures, including Tina Kandelaki and Ksenia Sobchak. Accel turned online schools into a trendy phenomenon.

Over the years, more than 40,000 individuals have graduated from Accel, the online institute, and the info-incubator. The audience indirectly engaging with these projects has surpassed one million. Sergey Kapustin transformed the micro-niche of online education into a sizable and profitable industry recognized at the national level.

Accel significantly boosted small businesses in the CIS market. The project was heralded as a leader in the online education industry. In 2019, the Accelerator became a laureate of the annual “National Business Awards” in the “Best Educational Business Project of the Year” category and received recognition from the Union of Russian Entrepreneurs and Industrialists. This award, established by the glossy magazine Melon Rich and the business magazine Finance Times, honors the top professionals in their fields as determined by editorial teams, an expert council, and leaders of public-business trade unions.

In 2020, the “Lakshmi-Ameya” Institute received two prestigious “PERSONO 2020” awards: “Best Online Institute in Astrology and Esoterics” and “Best Project for Promoting and Supporting Students in Astrology and Esoterics.” The international esoteric “Lotus” Award granted the online institute first place in its niche.

Today, the models proposed by Sergey Kapustin continue to be actively implemented in Kazakhstan and Latin America. He is already exploring new avenues for promoting online products, considering the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Sergey Kapustin predicts that online education will gradually move towards minimizing human involvement in many processes. While lessons will still be developed with an instructor, roles such as mentors could be partially replaced by AI with gamification elements. According to Sergey Kapustin, a systematic approach allows experts to be gradually removed from the process, keeping them outside of the product to eliminate the influence of human factors on the course’s internal processes.

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