Sharh — a startup that will help make choices based on reviews

Sardor Berdiev — Tashkent, founder of the Sharh startup, CEO of Commeta, Instagram

Sakhijamal Khudaybergenova, city — Tashkent, project manager, Instagram

How it all began

Last summer, our team transitioned from outsourcing development to a product-oriented approach that we had been working on for a long time. While the FinTech industry is well-developed in Uzbekistan, social-interactive solutions such as local review systems, crowdfunding platforms, and automated solutions for charity are still not fully optimized. Content creators in Uzbek and Russian languages face difficulties monetizing without advertising, as platforms like TikTok and YouTube do not provide them with sufficient opportunities.

We have already launched three products: “Cometa ID” — an identification system, Sharh — a product for B2B and B2C, and HCA — a crowdfunding platform.

The idea for creating Sharh arose because, although many reviews of local companies can be found on platforms like Google and Yandex, they often go unanswered. In Uzbekistan, it is difficult to choose a training center, clinic, or vacation spot without recommendations. This is especially relevant in growing Tashkent and in the market of developing domestic tourism. If I end up in Samarkand and do not know where to eat or where to go, I will need a platform with reliable reviews.

Sharh helps localize reviews, compile company ratings, and motivate businesses to improve their digital image. Our platform offers lead generation features and SaaS solutions for businesses. Through Sharh, companies can create accounts, collect reviews, add branches, import reviews from other platforms, and respond to them.

We also offer a microservice for restaurants — an electronic menu with QR codes. This is particularly useful for banks and organizations with an extensive network, helping to improve customer service. We believe that Sharh will help many businesses in Uzbekistan become better.

We started with a thorough market analysis, studying people, products, and competitors to offer users convenience and accessibility that were lacking in other services.

On our platform, any business can register, confirm its activity, and obtain a status. We have made the process of opening a business and collecting reviews as simple as possible. The project began with market and business analysis, after which we proceeded to write documentation and develop a strategy, including plans for the next three to five years.

Development started with design, and last December we released the MVP version. Since then, we have been actively developing, attracting new partners and users, gathering feedback, and refining the product.

Our mission is to contribute to the development of review, comment, and communication culture. We are creating a global platform that fosters the growth of these aspects. Without a mission, a startup loses its meaning.

During moderation, we take into account compliance with legislation and the presence of arguments. A user must express their opinion in at least 85 characters and justify their rating.

Team

Initially, we had 5–10 people. The core of the team consisted of people I had previously worked with on outsourcing projects. When selecting top management, I paid attention to soft skills, as in startups everyone performs many tasks, and it is important to support each other, work in non-standard conditions, and sometimes even at night.

The absence of direct competitors in the market is one of the biggest challenges. Although there are conditional competitors such as Yandex Maps and Google, they do not offer the same opportunities. We are independently conquering the market: attempts to create similar startups, such as Recommend.uz, ended in failure for various reasons, including funding issues and poor quality of customized analytics.

Target Audience 

We conducted thorough CustDev to avoid repeating the mistakes of predecessors. Our target audience is business. Business users automatically become part of our audience. 

Currently, we cooperate with more than 60 companies through direct contracts, technical agreements, or service agreements. Over 8,000 companies are registered in the app, and users can leave reviews in different categories. We have collected more than 400,000 reviews, and by the end of the year, we plan to reach 500,000.

Our app has been downloaded more than 90,000 times on Apple, Google Play, and AppGallery. We have more than 60,000 active users and about 65,000 registered users. 75 business partners have received the Verified badge. We also run a blog where we talk about service selection, demand, and share observations from our platform and other sources.

Incubation Programs

At the moment, we have not officially participated in incubators and accelerators, but we have experience participating in various programs. We also won in PitchExcel from Porsche. We plan to participate in the presidential competition in Uzbekistan.

We are preparing to attract investment, developing proposals, and are open to collaboration. In a startup, the most difficult moments are the last 10% of the work. Although we often think that the main work is already behind us, it is precisely at these final stages, such as signing contracts and releasing the product, that the greatest difficulties arise.

Challenges

We face typical challenges for review systems, specifically the problem of attracting users. We use various methods to simplify this process, for example, we set a minimum number of characters in a review — 85, which is approximately equal to 10 words. This is enough to express an opinion, whether positive or negative. In addition, each review must contain at least one argument: simply writing “everything is good” or “everything is bad” is not enough. We introduce the concept of “review weight,” which is determined by the number of arguments or the time spent writing the review. Reviews that do not meet these criteria do not pass moderation.

For those just starting out, the most important thing is the team. There are periods of disappointment, but like-minded people help cope with difficulties. Disputes and disagreements are inevitable, but it is important that the team comes together and moves forward. It is also necessary not to be afraid to release the product and test hypotheses — this helps to move forward.

Achievements

In 2023, we formed the core team, established HR processes, and organized the work of the technical department. High staff turnover is a common phenomenon that needs to be managed by learning from it. For 2024, our goal is strategy building. We started working with major partners, overcoming fear and doubts. Now, the largest companies in Uzbekistan have become our partners and friends.

Our team actively cooperates with agencies, associations, and volunteer foundations. We receive thanks and memorandums of cooperation, but most importantly, we continue to help NGOs and NPOs in Uzbekistan in the field of IT by providing services for website creation, bot development, and design. We plan to continue this in the future.

Plans

We are negotiating the integration of our projects into startups and popular products, which confirms interest in our developments. We are attracting investment and are at the Seed round stage, after which we will move to the next stage.

Previously, we focused on the product and partners, and now we plan to automate processes and launch a full-fledged marketing strategy.

At the moment, our AI assistant is under development. Our goal is to interact effectively with clients, process and summarize conversations, and convert text to voice and back. This will help us optimize review processing. There are already companies on our platform with 10,000–15,000 reviews. We strive to simplify the process so that one employee is sufficient to effectively manage reviews.

In addition, we plan to introduce a messenger for companies to communicate with the audience through separate chat rooms for reviews.