Over the past few years, the online education market has gone from niche courses to large-scale ecosystems capable of supporting people through different stages of life. One of the entrepreneurs who doesn't simply watch these changes but shapes them is Timur Ibragimov, founder and CEO of the education platform Sotka.Starting with exam preparation for school students, Ibragimov has built one of the largest education platforms on the market: today, more than 70,000 customers choose the company's products each year, and its annual revenue exceeds $25 million.In this interview, Timur Ibragimov explains why the future of education extends far beyond individual courses, how the role of edtech companies is changing, and why in ten years the main product will not be education itself but long-term support for a person at every stage of their development.Why do most education platforms limit themselves to one product or one stage of a customer's life?A lot of it has to do with the way the market developed. Most companies were built around one specific task: preparing for an exam, learning a language, mastering a profession, or upgrading qualifications. That approach is understandable and logical. Solving one problem is much easier than tackling several at once.But the model has a limit. It makes you look at a person through the lens of a particular product rather than through the lens of their life path. In reality, people's needs keep changing. First, they need help at school, then with getting into university, then with learning a profession, and later with a career change or a new set of skills. So I think the companies that win in the long run will be the ones that learn to support a person through the different stages of their development.When did you start looking at education technology companies this way?Gradually, I suppose. We started by preparing students for university entrance exams. Then came the all-in-one model, which let us combine preparation for several subjects within a single product. After that, we launched a track for the exams students take to move from ninth grade into tenth.Later, we began asking ourselves: if we already know how to help older students, why can't we help younger students? If the platform helps people prepare for exams, why not extend it to those interested in professions that are in demand? At some point, we stopped looking at separate stages of a person's life and began building a technology service for continuous development.Is that why the company launched a track for students in grades 1 through 8?Yes. We could see that many families only discovered us when their children reached the upper grades, with a year or two left before the exams. But helping a child earlier makes far more sense.So we began developing a track for students in grades 1 through 8 and building a technology platform for younger students, supported by a strong team of engineers and teachers, including recipients of Teacher of the Year awards, winners of professional competitions, and specialists with a great deal of practical experience. That lets us work not only on exam preparation but also on building the foundational knowledge that develops much earlier.Why were professional tracks the next step?Because the demand for new skills doesn't end after school. Look at the labor market, and it becomes obvious that people increasingly have to master new fields over the course of their lives.So it seemed logical to add tracks to the platform that give people practical materials and tools for in-demand fields and help them start earning. Today, these are tracks in artificial intelligence, content creation, design, programming, and other in-demand areas. In effect, we have expanded the range of problems we can help our users solve.So development is gradually turning into a lifelong process?I think it always has been. What has changed is the pace at which the world is changing. There was a time when a person could acquire the knowledge they needed once and use it for decades; today, many professions change far faster. New technologies, new tools, and new employer requirements keep appearing.So the ability to keep improving stops being an extra advantage and becomes a necessity. That is exactly why the service model that allows people to update their skills independently and regularly continues to grow.Many companies sell education as a one-off service. Why do you consider that model limited?Because it ends the moment one of the customer's problems is solved. Creating long-term value is far more interesting to me. Take the professional tracks: we built the model from the start so that a person retains access to the materials and information for a long time, and the materials themselves are updated regularly.Technology changes too fast. What was relevant two years ago may no longer work today. So a company's job is not only to hand over materials. It is to keep updating both the information and the tools needed to master it, and to keep everything current.What connects the products for school students, graduates, and adults inside one platform?The idea of a person's development. Despite the age difference, people are solving a similar problem: they are trying to move to the next level of what they are capable of.For a school student, that might mean getting into university. For a university student, access to the tools for a first set of professional skills. For an adult, a career change or a step up. The tools change, but the logic itself stays the same.What does the ideal education platform look like ten years from now?I think the boundaries between different digital education products will gradually disappear. People need separate courses or programs less and less as ends in themselves. What they need is a concrete result and a clear path to it.So education platforms will increasingly turn into systems that support people over time. They will help people gain knowledge, master new skills, adapt to changes in the market, and find new opportunities to grow. In my view, that is where the future of education lies.If you had to state the main principle of this model briefly, what would it be?Don't build a product around one stage of a person's life. Build a system that helps them grow over many years. I think that is the direction the whole edtech industry is gradually moving in.