🚶‍♀️ 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.