It All Started with a Real Problem
It all started with a very real and frustrating problem. At the time, I was working on a startup that provided consumable goods to restaurants and cafés through an online platform. But with the outbreak of COVID and extreme inflation in Iran, continuing that business became extremely draining.
We had to request and update prices for hundreds of products every single day. Inflation was skyrocketing, and every supplier had different rates. For each item, we had to call multiple vendors. It was time-consuming, exhausting, and always uncertain.
One day I thought: “I wish I could just write what I need once, and that request would automatically go out to all the relevant sellers, and they could reply—then I’d just pick the best price!”
That exact sentence became the spark for Mazzaneh. After that, I spent months researching and shaping the direction of the platform. By late 2021, we officially began building it.
At first, I considered turning Mazzaneh into a traditional online store—but I quickly realized that would mean competing with giants like Digikala, Torob, Divar, and others… all with zero funding. That path clearly wouldn’t work.
So I changed course. I studied the weak points of those big platforms and started designing a totally different model that wouldn’t need to compete with them head-on: start the buying process from the buyer’s side, let the request go out to relevant businesses, and let sellers reply privately with their offer—without publicly listing products or prices.
This became the core of what we later called Mazzaneh Begir: one request, multiple private offers, best match.
