How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Our Moscow pizzerias are simply beautiful!

Last year, we began conquering Russia’s capital. It led to a battle over Moscow with Domino's. Read more about it: Domino's wants me to delete its mentions on Facebook because I'm a rival's CEO. Should I?

Dodo Pizza has 30 pizza shops in the city. And the number is growing every month.

This month, our remarkable partner in Kyrgyzstan, Esen Jumanov, and his team opened their second Dodo Pizza in Bishkek, the country’s capital. My warmest congratulations!

The Dodo team in Kyrgyzstan is tough. Bishkek isn’t a rich city, but our first pizzeria shows solid results and constant growth due to creative marketing, effective operations, and stable quality of the product. The pizzeria is profitable and nets around $50,000 a month in sales.

Our business model can work in very different markets. In this spreadsheet, you can study the monthly sales of any Dodo Pizza shop out of the 343 we now have. If you want to open a Dodo Pizza in any country, reach out to us at franchise@dodopizza.com.

Stopping by at the first Dodo Pizza opened in Saint Petersburg, Russia…. It belongs to our franchisee Sergey Gritsenko. Sergey was one of our first partners—and he is among the toughest. He opened his first Dodo Pizza in his home town in Bashkortostan. Then he sold it and set out on a journey to conquer the Northern Capital, AKA Saint Petersburg. Now his Dodo Pizza is considered a legendary pizzeria in our chain. Showing pretty impressive financial results (in May, it netted 6.7 mln rubles—around $106,000), its team manages to provide customers with superb service. They follow all of our rules, they keep the place super clean, and they are fast. I’m proud to have such an amazing team aboard.

300 pizza shops in Russia! Last weekend, Dodo Pizza reached a symbolic milestone—we opened our 300th pizzeria in Russia, in Anapa, a city on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Seven years ago, when we just started, this number would have looked insane. In total, we now have 338 pizzerias in 10 countries.

Twice he almost cried because of Dodo Pizza. First, after reading a book about the company’s founder, Fyodor Ovchinnikov. Second, when washing the dishes at Dodo Pizza in Pargolovo in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.

Yuri Kostin didn’t consider himself a softy. He used to work at a market. He handed out leaflets in the streets and helped with the family business. He grew up in Syktyvkar, Russia, earned a scholarship in Sweden, and studied and worked in Finland. He now was a father of three kids.

An arduous toil couldn’t scare him off. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come to...