Uzbek shops sell on nasiya with a passport photocopy and a notebook. Nous scores the buyer, writes the contract, and collects every payment.
The problem
The selling is modern. The bookkeeping is a notebook, a photocopier and the owner's phone.
One buyer can open four plans on one street in an afternoon. Nobody finds out until month three, when all four go quiet.
Every reminder is a call the owner makes personally. Nothing gets logged, nothing escalates, and the awkward ones get skipped.
Ask a shop owner what is due next week and you get a shrug and a notebook.
The big platforms sign chains, take the customer relationship and a heavy cut. The ten-person shop gets nothing.
The failure nobody sees
A buyer walks down a street of furniture shops. Each one takes a passport photocopy, writes a schedule in a notebook, and hands over the goods. None of them can see the other three.
Every shop on that street has priced its margin for a default rate it cannot measure, on a buyer it cannot see. When the plans go bad they go bad together, and the owner absorbs it as the cost of doing business.
Stacking is not an edge case. It is the single largest source of loss in installment retail here, and it is invisible by construction, because there is no shared ledger.
What Nous returns at the counter
Returned in under a second, before the goods leave the shop.
The solution
Merchants get a buyer check they cannot build alone, and the operational tooling that makes contributing to it worth doing.
Score the buyer and see every plan they hold across the network.
Schedule, effective rate and an affordability guard.
Contract filled from the plan, signed with an SMS code.
Telegram and SMS ladder, payment links, overdue escalation.
The shop keeps its capital, its margin and its customer. We never touch the receivable.
Product
The seller types a PINFL and a phone number. Everything else is generated. No training programme, no consultant.
Flat markup rather than interest, down payments, cash at the counter, Telegram over email, Uzbek and Russian interfaces, PINFL as the identity key.
The reminder ladder is the feature owners ask for twice. It removes the most unpleasant part of the job and it is why they stay subscribed.
Portfolio, one screen
Live demo at nous.uz/demoSample portfolio from the interactive demo. Every number on this screen is computed from the plans the shop has entered.
Why now
Consumer installment buying has moved from a favour to the default way mid-ticket goods are sold in Uzbekistan. Volume arrived before any infrastructure did.
PINFL, digital passport records and OTP signing give a shop a reliable identity key for the first time. Five years ago there was nothing to join records on.
Click, Payme and Uzum made collecting a payment a link. Telegram made reaching a buyer free. The expensive parts of this product are now commodities.
Market
Retail and trade businesses in Uzbekistan
registered trade entities
~110 000
Selling on installments today
our field estimate, goods above 1 mln UZS
~60 000
Reachable now (SAM)
2+ staff, Tashkent and regional centres
~12 000
Software ARR at that SAM
12 000 shops × $31/mo × 12
~$4.3M
With checks and collection fees
blended ARPU $76/mo at maturity
~$11M
Our bottom-up estimate from field interviews and public registry counts, not a purchased market report. The arithmetic is shown so it can be argued with.
Business model
390 000 UZS a month for the working shop. Predictable, and the number a retailer compares against one staff member's week of phone calls.
~60% of revenue at maturity
3 000 UZS per check beyond quota. Usage scales with the shop's own volume, so revenue grows without a new sale.
~25%
0.4% of payments routed through Nous links. We only earn it when money actually arrives, which keeps us aligned with the shop.
~15%
We make money when a shop sells safely and gets paid. We make nothing from a buyer defaulting, and nothing from a shop lending more than it should. That is the opposite of how the BNPL platforms are paid.
The bet
$76
Blended ARPU per shop, per month, at maturity
subscription + checks + collection fee
< $120
Target cost to acquire a shop
field sales, one visit, same-day import
< 3 mo
Payback on acquisition
what makes field sales work at this price
> 90%
Annual logo retention target
the ladder makes leaving painful
These are targets we are testing with the first cohort, not measured results. The point of the pre-seed is to prove or break them. ARPU and payback first, retention second.
Competition
| Buyer check | Runs the plan | Shop keeps margin | Fits a 10-person shop | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nous | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Bank / BNPL platforms | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Generic CRM or ERP | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Excel and a notebook | No | No | Yes | Yes |
The BNPL platforms are competitors for the buyer and partners for nobody; they onboard chains and take the relationship. The small and mid-size shop, which is most of the market by count, has no product at all.
Why we win
Every shop that joins makes the stacking check sharper for every other shop. A competitor starting later starts with an empty graph, and the graph is the product.
Nous is used at the moment of sale, by the seller, on every single deal. That is the hardest position to be displaced from in retail software.
Flat markup, down payments, cash payments, Telegram, passport PINFL, Uzbek contract law. Generic lending software gets all of this wrong.
Go to market
Exposure data is only useful where it is dense. We saturate a cluster before moving, so the stacking check actually works for the shops in it.
Walk-in field sales, same-day import, free tier to get plans in. Density before breadth.
Repeat the cluster playbook with a local rep. Referral from cohort one carries most of it.
They want their dealers checked. One contract puts Nous on dozens of counters, and brings the volume the graph needs.
Where we are
Team
Founder
Building Nous from Tashkent. Replace this line with the specific thing that makes you the person to solve installment risk here.
The ask
To get to the milestone that makes the network self-sustaining:
300 paying shops and 25 000 plans under management. Enough network for the exposure check to be the reason shops stay.
Use of funds
Counter app, scoring, integrations
Field sales in Tashkent and Samarkand
Personal data, credit information partner
Onboarding and support
That is the whole company. The software is how we get merchants to contribute to it, and the reason they stay.
nous.uz · Tashkent