Daribar.kz is a startup that allows you to order products from pharmacies with savings of up to 30%.

The founder of the startup Daribar.kz, Denis Sermukhametov, shared the story of creating the startup, talked about the difficulties and future plans.

How it all started

I am an IT specialist, a programmer from Almaty. I have been programming since the fourth grade and always knew that my life would be connected with IT, because every program has its own soul. I developed and built my career in various IT companies, and then I returned to Kazakhstan at the request of my parents to modernize equipment. Then I started working on the Daribar project.

I often have to go to the pharmacy to get medicine, and situations arise when you have to stand in line and wait a long time to buy a drug for which there is no analogue. Because of this, you have to call your parents or grandmother to clarify whether an analogue will do. Meanwhile, someone behind you starts to hurry, which can cause stress. This not only takes a lot of time and effort from each person, but also from the pharmacist. Previously, there were websites of large pharmacy chains and aggregators, but to this day many pharmacies accept orders by phone and deliver them by courier, which can be inconvenient for buyers.

Therefore, the idea arose to unite both small and large pharmacy chains under the common name Daribar. Our project started its activities in 2022, starting with self-pickup. We distributed leaflets and flyers in pharmacies to attract customers' attention.

Our project is different in that it is a geolocation marketplace. Instead of providing a simple list of pharmacies, we offer a choice of the best seller, who then handles delivery. This allows us to offer our customers faster access to pharmacies for pickup or delivery. For example, our delivery record is about 20 minutes from the time of the order.

Team

As an IT specialist, it was easier for me to assemble a team for the project. I asked for help from my friends and acquaintances from university and school to help me interview candidates. This turned out to be an effective way, since I myself did not have to get nervous during interviews.

Unlike many startups, we had an advantage due to the presence of large aggregators in the market, although they lacked integration. Despite the instability of demand for medicines compared to consumer goods, our project is designed to help people take care of others. Team building was a natural process for me, as I had already managed other IT teams. I was both CEO and CTO.

Then, based on many open source solutions, we glued together a prototype so that it could start working. Our market is quite interesting, with many ERP systems for pharmacies and different suppliers. Integration with each of them is a complex technical task, and it is important to maintain the correct protocols. This task is still not fully solved, but we are becoming more experienced in fulfilling orders. The market is becoming more competitive, and pharmacy chains are also actively developing their online platforms, which makes them our indirect competitors. In IT, you have to constantly make efforts to be competitive.

Target audience

We surveyed our loyal customers and found that most of the target audience are office workers who want to save time. These are managers and business owners.

Every startupper dreams of creating a project for everyone. This doesn't happen, but we try to bring a certain value to each audience. Now we are helping people who value their time. And as a rule, the value of time for each person increases with age. Therefore, our target audience is the audience that wants to order efficiently and quickly.

And most often it turns out to save money on this, because we show not only the remaining stock, but also synchronize prices.

Today, 100,000 people use our website and application every month. Of them, the conversion to an order is 5-7% of the audience. It turns out that we help thousands of people buy medicines every month. Our audience is actively growing.

Acceleration programs

In the summer, we plan to participate in StarX. This is a large American accelerator that is in the top 10. We were invited from the ABC company, which cooperates with Nazarbayev University. Therefore, we are actively preparing for future incubation.
Now we are actively looking for investors to enter new markets.

Difficulties

The difficulty is that we do not have our own delivery and warehouses. And each of our partner pharmacies has its own features in managing the assortment and pricing policy. Therefore, we have to be flexible.

We believe that in the future most orders in Kazakhstan will be made online, which will make the process of buying medicines more convenient for customers.

We are actively helping pharmacies go online. Our task is to simplify the lives of pharmacists. We care about our partners and strive to help them. There are 7,000 pharmacies working in Kazakhstan, and in the next three years we want to involve as many of them as possible in online.

Recommendations

Understanding the demand for functionality is a key aspect. I made mistakes by overestimating the importance of certain features that turned out to be less in demand by users. Active research of customers, especially new users, helps to get objective feedback and avoid the need for rework in the future. It is also necessary to identify and take into account the pain points of users. However, it is important to keep faith in your idea, sometimes technological breakthroughs can help to implement it. For this, a team that shares your vision and is ready to look for new growth opportunities is important.

When my girlfriend asked me to find an allergy medicine, I expected many options. However, it turned out that only seven pharmacies were available, and they were all nearby. Then the idea came to me: why not show pharmacies where there are not only a specific medicine, but also its analogues? We have a high quality standard, and we provide the user with a much greater choice. We conducted many studies to properly test this functionality and save money on development.

My main advice is to strongly believe in your idea, but be ready for changes based on real CustDev questions.

Achievements

We have already helped more than 50,000 Kazakhstani citizens who ordered medicines through our platform. Our search works instantly, allowing you to order medicines in a matter of seconds. We have integrated more than 300 pharmacies directly, which makes us leaders in this field. We not only help buy medicines, but also accompany users, helping them with taking medicines. Our digital function of an alarm clock for taking medicines helps users not to miss receptions, including vitamin D in the winter period. Our mission is to make people's lives happier through digital technologies, paying special attention to health. We strive to create a healthy society by helping our users maintain their health.

Plans

We are actively focusing on improving the service so that more orders are completed successfully. We confirm orders and ensure customers confidence in the results. Our goal is to make processes more efficient, introduce the first pharmacies online and strengthen the core of our system to provide the best service. In addition, we strive to become an ecosystem, offering functions of accompaniment in treatment, reminders about taking medicines and a virtual assistant — an artificial intelligence pharmacist providing a quality second opinion.

Modern startups need to actively introduce artificial intelligence into their strategies, as this is becoming increasingly important in the future. Large companies are actively investing in video cards, and this is causing a real battle in the market. Medical tests are already being taken using neural networks, and in the future they may become a certified tool for checking diagnoses. All this indicates a bright future that awaits us in the field of artificial intelligence.