This is the story of Komil Ruzaev, who started a successful new business on the internet and has made it grow beyond frontiers.
My name is Komil, and I am 30. I was born in one of the most marvellous an- cient cities of Uzbekistan – Bukhara. My parents were school teachers, which meant our family wasn’t so well off because of the low salaries teachers received in an independent Uzbekistan, following the collapse of Soviet Union. I still re- member that we had financial difficulties in our family during the 90s, when plain bread with unsweetened tea was our usual daily breakfast. Probably this was one of the main reasons of my impulse to be self-employed.
My parents always believed in me and in any ventures which I started. My father often insisted me that I should lead our family to a new level. He wanted me to be successful, and stick only to proper values.
I started to work at the age of fourteen. It was a time when I saw how much money passed me by. I used to work for many people, but it was always a prob- lem for me to work for someone else and get just a salary. The older I became the more I realised that it is necessary to be an independent person. My ambi- tions and financial goals always told me that only my own business could allow me to achieve the kind of life I wanted for myself.
As a first step, I got a proper business education at Westminster International University in Tashkent. During my studies there, I found like-minded people among my course mates, and we became very good friends. Later, I and other my three university friends started trading on the stock market of Uzbekistan, where we were very successful. However, Uzbekistan was hit by the financial cri- sis in summer 2009 – as were many other countries – caused by the real estate bubble in the U.S. It became a challenge for us, as the Uzbekistan stock market was not so profitable during that time. So it was a good opportunity for us to ex- plore new horizons.
We had been following the trends in the global web industry for a long time in order to explore online business ideas that could also be successful in our coun- try. Followed by that, one of our friends once showed us how the daily deal busi- ness was growing rapidly in the U.S. We were intrigued by this idea, and did some investigation and read several articles about this business model in the U.S. Later, we discussed it, but inside one hour decided that Uzbekistan was not ready for such an online business, but that Russia was ready enough. Collective buying services were not yet been popular in the Russian internet industry. The company name – Kupikupon (“buy a coupon”) was thought up by the same friend. We liked his idea and we all immediately came to an agreement. One week later we were already in Moscow.
Our mission to conquer the Russian internet portal was a real test of our
strengths. It was quite hard to start a company without any experience from the scratch in a country where you know absolutely no one who might help you. We had no idea how to open a company in a different country, how to draft con- tracts, hire staff etc. We made a lot of mistakes and omissions, and we stumbled many times. However, we were full of enthusiasm and firm in our ideas, as we
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always knew that whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Simply, we were never frightened to fail, and trusted ourselves. If someone is scared of failure, he will never become a successful entrepreneur, since any business brings its own difficulties.
We started our business completely from the scratch, i.e. without any platform or databases, and with no existing systems, unlike our top competitors. They start- ed off building on the basis of already existing companies in the U.S. and North Europe, and they launched six months earlier than we did. Thus we were in a catch-up mode. But our financial education helped us very much. We did not sleep for almost two weeks before we launched our business project. We used to take all decisions promptly. Sometimes there were some significant decisions that we had to tackle in less than a day, i.e. in the initial stages we had a strate- gy that no decision was to be delayed.
I am grateful to my close family members who always supported me; however other relatives and some friends thought that we were insane when we left our perfect and comparatively wealthy lifestyle in Uzbekistan for a place that was completely unknown and very difficult for doing business. Nevertheless, we ac- complished our startup project within three months. We found programmers to create our online platform and then registered it. In parallel to this, we hired the sales managers who could start searching for our first customers and profession- ally demonstrate the benefits of cooperating with us as an effective way of pro- moting their products or services. As a result, our website became a good inter- mediary between companies and their potential clients, who had the chance of getting whatever they liked at better prices.
From very beginning we were investing our own money and money from so- called “friends and family” investors. In this regard, we were very limited in our funds. In two years our company has grown exponentially and we have become a well-known company in Russia, owing to our persistence and team working. But as soon as this market became very attractive, the number of players with greater capital resources increased. The rivalry got very tight, and in order to keep our market share, we had to attract a professional investment fund to raise our capital base.
We were afraid to spend money on advertising at first. We thought that it would be a waste of money, since our business model was completely unfamiliar in Russia. With only limited start-up capital, we had thought that it would not be effective to spend it on advertising. Now I understand that this was one of our greatest mistakes, as we shouldn’t have afraid of that.
Having started in Moscow, we gradually began to expand to the other big cities of Russia and later on to countries such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus, be- cause it was easier to expand in these countries in our early stages due to simi- larity of the legal framework and prevalence of the Russian language. Next, we continued our expansion into the Baltic countries, but we knew this was already Europe – a different culture and language. Clearly, our brand name was clear in the Russian language, but would be quite unclear there. Therefore we have had to promote our services under a different brand name that would be easy to pro- nounce, without some unwanted extra meaning. After much research in focus groups we chose the name "Zizu" (vivid, short and easy to remember). In all three Baltic countries, we are represented under this brand.
Practically, with each new market it has taken less effort to create our subsidi- ary. For today, in almost all of our markets, we are one of the most prominent and successful representatives of collective buying services. Before entering a particular market, one of us used to visit this country to conduct all the neces- sary investigations on the spot. Then we recruited our team from locals, whose task was to run our units in their countries. Nowadays, we employ 150+ employ- ees in Russia and about 50 employees in other countries. We use a democratic style of management, where we have very friendly relations with our employees. We prefer them to share their views on how we can improve our business.
As there are four of us, we are still running our business on a day-to-day basis. This is mainly because no one can do it better than us! We have distributed the core managerial positions in our company among ourselves (marketing, HR, sales, IT, investor relations). We usually try to delegate routine work and rather concentrate on developing new directions for our business.
Nowadays, we are still one of the top 3 deal-of-the-day websites in Russia. In the future, I want to see our company become much more stable, more profitable, much bigger and a more diversified business. We still have much work to do, but one thing I have found for myself is that what I should not forget about is my family and personal life. At first I didn’t pay attention to this. Later I understood that without life outside work, our business will suffer. Any person should have a time for rest and should set enough time aside for his family.
4.5 FROM SELLING BAGS AND PASTRIES ON THE STREET TO