Zakroma — a transparent grain marketplace

Challenge

Russian grain trading has historically been a broker-heavy market. A wheat or sunflower farmer in Voronezh or Rostov often sells through two or three intermediaries before the lot reaches its end buyer, each layer taking margin and eroding trust on quality signals. The buyers — mills, feed producers, traders — face the inverse problem: they need verifiable supply from named farms, not a broker’s word.

The core product constraints were sharp:

• Asymmetric user profiles. Farmers rarely have appetite for new software; buyers expect a real web platform with accounts, filters, and history.
• Listings need trust. Every lot should be moderated before a buyer sees it, or the marketplace becomes noise.
• Regional coverage. Voronezh, Krasnodar, and Rostov to start — three of Russia’s largest grain-producing federal regions.

Solution

We built Zakroma as a two-surface marketplace with deliberately asymmetric UX.

Farmers list lots through a Telegram bot — zero registration, a conversational form that captures crop, volume, region, price, and photos. The bot is the only surface a seller ever needs. Crucially, there is no farmer-facing dashboard — we remove every screen a rural seller could get stuck on.

Buyers use a web platform at zakroma.market — authenticated accounts, filterable listings across nine crop categories (wheat, corn, sunflower, barley, peas, soy, and more), and direct contact with a farmer once a match is made.

Between the two sides sits a moderation layer. Every bot-submitted lot is reviewed by the Zakroma team before it becomes visible to buyers. The trust burden lives on the platform, not the end user.

Results

Platform operating across three Russian federal regions at launch, nine crop categories live, and farmer onboarding that takes minutes rather than a support call.

Full deal-volume and conversion metrics are available on request.

What we learned

• For two-sided marketplaces with unequal technical comfort, accept asymmetric UX as a feature, not a compromise. A Telegram-only seller funnel paired with a full web buyer funnel outperforms a unified “app for everyone” almost every time.
• Moderation is the product. Automated quality filters never replace a human scan of a crop listing.
• Picking three regions to start, not the whole country, kept the trust loop small enough to iterate on.