Launching a grocery delivery service from zero
In 2023 I launched Bozor Boy, a grocery delivery startup in Tashkent, and owned operations, partners, marketing and the product at once. What that taught me about product work.
From April 2023 to August 2024 I was Head of Operations and Startup Launch at Bozor Boy, a grocery delivery service in Tashkent. Bozor is the Uzbek word for the bazaar, and the idea was simple: the bazaar's groceries, delivered to the door. I built and launched it from the ground up and owned four things at once: operations, partnerships, marketing and the digital product.
It was the first job where nobody stood between me and the result. These are the lessons that stayed with me.
In delivery, the product is the operation
The app is the smallest part of what a delivery customer experiences. The order arrives on time and complete, or it doesn't, and no screen can fix that. Almost every product decision turned out to be an operations decision. I learned to follow an order from the customer's tap to the moment it was handed over at the door before I changed a single screen.
Partners decide what you can promise
A grocery service can promise only what its suppliers can deliver. What is in stock, what it costs today, what quality arrives: all of that comes from partners. Working with suppliers was not a side task of the launch. It shaped the catalogue, the prices and the delivery promise.
The first customers come from somewhere specific
Marketing a new service does not start with a campaign. It starts with finding the first people who have the problem badly enough to try something new. For groceries those are people who value their time more than the trip to the bazaar. Knowing who they were shaped the product as much as it shaped the advertising.
Own the whole loop once
Owning every side at once is exhausting, and it does not scale. But it gave me something I use every day as a product manager: I know what operations, partners and marketing need from the product, because for seventeen months I was all of them. When I write a requirement now, I can see who will pay for it further down the line.
What I carried into product work
- Follow one real order, request or claim from start to finish before redesigning anything.
- Treat partners' constraints as product requirements, not as excuses.
- Name the first customers precisely. A vague audience produces a vague product.
- Before handing a requirement to a team, ask who pays for it downstream.
In August 2024 I left to start a studio, Keypix. The habit of following the whole loop came with me.