01 The incumbent had a head start of years, and it did not matter
Two marketplaces, one survivor
Türkiye's instrument market got two marketplaces at roughly the same time. Dore Music, the sector's most recognized brand, had commissioned its own platform, Rhym, from another development team years earlier. Müzigo, built by ETREXIO for instrument retailer and music educator Erkan Erten, started later and shipped faster.
The two products were not equals. Rhym launched riddled with problems: creating a listing was a struggle, the product was loaded with features nobody needed, and the underlying model was not even a true marketplace. Users listed an instrument, Dore made an offer, and that was it. Built without real product thinking on a weak codebase, it failed to gain traction and was heading for shutdown. Müzigo, meanwhile, simply flowed. Erkan had first found us years earlier through Bionluk, a Turkish freelancing platform, for a course management project. Back then he had also bought a ready-made marketplace module and asked us to adapt it. The ready-made experiment died quickly, which taught both of us the lesson that shaped everything after: marketplaces do not survive on templates.
02 Six months from agreement to a full marketplace on every platform
Cold start, solved on day one
When Erkan came back years later asking how to scale beyond his physical stores and small online shop, we agreed on a marketplace and moved fast. In about six months, web, mobile, and admin were all live, with mobile leading the way, running on Azure infrastructure, a departure from the AWS setup we use on most projects.
The classic cold start problem never happened. Erkan's own inventory had structured XML feeds, so the marketplace was stocked from the first day, and no early user ever saw an empty shelf. Corporate sellers who wanted in were onboarded through XML automations so streamlined that their entire catalogs came in with one click, no manual editing or review required. With solid social media management and advertising on top, sales started arriving on both the new and second-hand sides, and the platform's name began to circulate. New instruments settled at roughly 60 to 70 percent of listings, with second-hand growing at its own steadier pace.
Erkan says the same thing in nearly every meeting: what he values most is how much our experience simplifies his decisions, and how completely he trusts our speed. Coming from a man who once watched a ready-made marketplace module fail him, that trust was earned the hard way.
- Web, mobile, and admin platforms shipped in about six months
- XML onboarding: corporate seller catalogs imported with one click
- Marketplace stocked from day one, no cold start
- AI-assisted campaign management fed by search and trend data
03 The feature that ended second-hand fraud
The expertise service
Buying a used instrument online is a leap of faith. On classifieds sites, you cannot know whether the guitar in the photos is the guitar in the box, and if it is not, the refund fight begins.
Müzigo productized the answer. At checkout, a buyer can add an expertise service for a fee. The instrument then ships first to Müzigo's physical store, where the team inspects it against the listing: is it as described, are there visible or hidden defects? If problems surface, the buyer is informed and chooses: accept it anyway and it ships on, or walk away and the item returns to the seller with the order cancelled. Sellers whose items repeatedly fail inspection are removed from the platform.
The result is a marketplace where second-hand fraud structurally cannot survive, which is precisely the kind of trust that separates a real platform from a listing board.
04 Automation instead of headcount
Two people, an entire marketplace
Until the acquisition, the entire operation ran on two people, and neither of them was an engineer on Erkan's payroll. Design, code, deployment, and product management all sat with ETREXIO, work that conventionally needs a team of five or six for a project spanning web, mobile, and admin panel, because a marketplace is not a simple product on any layer.
Operations stayed lean because the system managed its own processes. Shipping and marketing ran through partner APIs and webhooks, so a human only needed to watch the flow, not push it. Search history and popular-query data, processed with AI support, drove campaign and promotion management, the kind of work that normally splits across separate marketing and data departments. No such hires were ever needed, and no operational backlog ever formed. The lesson generalizes: headcount is not what runs a marketplace. Systems are.
05 The market leader chose to buy rather than compete
The merger, and what came after
Erkan sold instruments, so he already knew the Dore Music team, and they had been watching Müzigo. In one of those conversations the idea landed: combine Dore's brand recognition and capital with Müzigo's working product and team experience, and lead the market together. Dore parted ways with the team that had built the original Rhym, acquired Erkan's company, and brought him in as product lead. Müzigo took the Rhym name, and the merger was announced with a social media campaign featuring one of Türkiye's biggest pop stars, Kenan Doğulu. ETREXIO continues as the product's development team.
The relaunched platform absorbed the original Rhym's one good idea and made it optional: with Sell to Rhym, a seller gets a same-day offer without ever creating a listing, at a slightly below-market price, while Sell on Rhym puts the item on the open marketplace for patient sellers who want more. Today the platform carries around 28,000 listings across 858 categories and 722 brands, serves roughly 5,000 registered users of whom well over a thousand also operate as stores, and stands as Türkiye's largest instrument marketplace. It came out of a two-person operation, and we are still the ones building it.
