Walk & Talk

🚶‍♀️ @janob_marketolog: "Amazing project"

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Go to Walk & Talks

🚶‍♀️ Walk & Talk.

Otabek Sharapov is joining us this Sunday.

You might have seen him on stage at the Tashkent Advertising Festival, or read him without knowing it. He's the author of @marketingbolimi, the first Uzbek-language channel about marketing.

He studied at Bangor University, then co-founded 605 Agency, where he is CEO and Creative Director. The agency was named Agency of the Year in 2024 and again in 2025. Their promise is work that becomes duv-duv gap, the thing the whole mahalla ends up talking about.

He also founded Duv-Duv Gap School, the first creative school in Uzbekistan, where the 605 team teaches the next generation how ideas get made.

The Marketing Association of Uzbekistan put him in its Top-35 Marketers of 2025. He curates the Local Opportunities section at both the Tashkent Marketing Forum and the Tashkent Advertising Festival, and sits on the jury of Brand Awards International.

We recently called Walk & Talk the gap that walks. This Sunday, a man who makes duv-duv gap for a living walks with us.

Sunday. Come talk to him.

🚶‍♀️ Register / I'm coming.

Did you read it fully?

🚶‍♀️ Korzinka Biznes Office Visit

We went on another office visit. But there was one small problem. It wasn't an office.

There were no rows of desks and no meeting rooms with glass walls. Just high shelves, big boxes and a lot of space. We were inside Korzinka Biznes. (Yes, Biznes with a z. That's the real spelling.)

Most of us know Korzinka as the supermarket near our house. This is something different. Korzinka Biznes sells to businesses: hotels, restaurants, cafés, mini-markets and more. People in the industry have a short name for the first three: HoReCa, which stands for Hotel, Restaurant, Café.

If you run one of these, you can buy from Korzinka Biznes for less. The catch is you buy in bulk. You don't buy one bottle of oil. You buy the whole box. And they can deliver it to your door. They also sell things you won't find in any normal Korzinka.

If this sounds like Costco, you're right.

In 1976, a man named Sol Price opened the Price Club in San Diego. It was inside old airplane hangars that once belonged to Howard Hughes. And it was made for small business owners so low prices, big quantities, almost no decoration. Costco opened in Seattle in 1983, and the two companies joined together ten years later.

So Korzinka Biznes looks like Costco's first chapter.

If you sell to businesses, why not just take orders online and deliver them? Why build a huge warehouse where people walk around and touch things?

The bazaar model.

In Uzbekistan, we grew up with bazaars. We want to see the tomatoes. We want to pick up the melon and knock on it. We want to check the rice with our own hands. Imagine a restaurant owner who has bought from Chorsu for 20 years. He will not trust a photo on a screen. So Korzinka built a place where he can touch and see before he buys.

I expected Sherzod Khoshimov (Sherzod aka), who leads Korzinka Biznes, to name another supermarket as his main competitor. No, he said the bazaar.

That surprised me at first. Then it made sense. "Bazaar" is an old Persian word. It traveled through Turkish and Italian before it reached English. The word is old because the habit is old. For hundreds of years, people on the Silk Road bought and sold face to face, hand to hand.

And the bazaar's strongest tool is the relationship. Your bazaar seller knows your name. He knows you buy 10 kilos every Friday. He saves the good ones for you.

So what does Sherzod aka do? He does what the bazaar does.

When he was asked an advice for his competitors, his answer was to talk to your customers. Go to them. Visit the café. Meet the owner. Learn what they need.

You can't personally visit 10,000 cafés. But Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, wrote a famous essay about this called "Do Things That Don't Scale." His point is that in the beginning a business doesn't grow by itself. The founders have to push it. He tells a story about the Collison brothers, who started Stripe. When someone agreed to try their product, they didn't say "we'll send you a link." They said, "Right then, give me your laptop," and set it up right there.

Sherzod aka's version is: "Right then, let's go to your café."

It seems to work. They started last November. Today they have more than 300 business customers.

A company as big as Korzinka still sends a person to sit with a café owner and listen. It's the least big-company thing you can do, and maybe the smartest.

We do something like that every Sunday. We walk, and we talk to people face to face. That doesn't scale either.

Maybe that's the point.

Nice one, Korzinka. Thank you, Sherzod aka, for having us.

Join us for the next one.

🚶‍♀️ Register / I'm coming.

Pick a random number between 1 and 100. Don't think. Just pick.

Most people pick 37. In a survey of around 200,000 people, 37 won. It beat every other number.

Why? Because 37 does not feel chosen.

It is not round like 50. Not lucky like 7. Not neat like 25.

It feels like a number a human would say. So we all say it.

A few more:

Your body, right now, is 37 degrees Celsius.

37 × 3 = 111. 37 × 6 = 222. 37 × 9 = 333. Keep going and you get 444, 555, all the way to 999.

The company behind Basecamp is called 37signals. It is named after 37 radio signals from space that nobody has ever been able to explain.

So yes. A good number.

🚶‍♀️ Walk & Talk #37

"Amateur" comes from the Latin word amator. It means a lover. Someone who does a thing because they love it.

Later the word changed. Today "amateur" means someone who is not good at it. The professionals took the word serious for themselves.

James Carse wrote about two kinds of games.

A finite game is played to win. There is a clock. There is a winner. Then it ends.

An infinite game is played to keep playing. You only lose if you stop showing up.

We have done 37 Walk & Talks.

No medal at the top of the hill. Nobody has ever won a Walk & Talk.

And not all 37 were good. Some were six people and wind so strong that talking was hard. Some routes I picked badly, and I knew it by the second kilometre.

But we came back. That is the whole game.

We are amateurs. In the old sense.

No winner again this week.

See you at 38.

🚶‍♀️ walkandtalk.uz

🚶‍♀️ Walk & Talk. Yunusjon Yusupov is walking with us tomorrow.

The SEO used to be simple as ranking on Google. Then people stopped clicking. They started asking ChatGPT and taking the first answer it gave them. Yunusjon builds for that second world.

He's the founder of rankveo.com. "Rank on Google. Get cited by AI." It finds the keywords, writes the content, publishes it straight into your CMS, then tracks where you sit in Google, Bing and Yandex, and whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity actually name you when someone asks.

He has six or seven years of writing code. His specialism is the unglamorous commercial end like paid ads, SEO, GEO, and AEO, generative and answer engine optimization.

He also writes an IT blog in Uzbek for about 1,800 people at @yunus_code.

He once described his own schedule as "9-18 job and 18-9 startups."

See you tomorrow.

🚶‍♀️ Register / I'm coming.