01 Years with another agency had produced nothing
Burned once, and an industry built on guesswork
Mehmet Saygun has run device repair shops in Germany for years, so he knows both sides of the industry's dysfunction. Customers with no technical knowledge get quoted whatever a shop feels like charging: a job worth 10 euros in one city priced at 120 in another, or nonsense upsells like insisting a screen replacement somehow requires replacing something else too. Meanwhile shop owners drown in the same questions all day, starting with what happened to my phone.
He had tried to fix it before. A previous agency from Türkiye consumed years and delivered nothing shippable, and Mehmet had sworn off outsourced teams entirely. A referral brought him to ETREXIO, and he decided to risk exactly one more attempt.
02 Device, fault, price range, time range: visible before anyone commits
Three platforms and a rulebook
We built RepairFinder as three connected platforms: a customer app, a shop platform, and the RepairFinder backoffice. A customer enters their device and fault through a guided, choice-based flow rather than a free-form text box, nearby shops receive the request and accept or decline, and the entire repair lifecycle runs inside the same system, down to notifying the customer instantly if a spare part shipment is delayed.
The heart of it is the rule set. For every device, the allowed operations and their price and time ranges are managed centrally from the admin panel, with room for regional differences, since a repair in Köln does not cost what it costs in Berlin. Within those bounds, arbitrary pricing is structurally impossible. The customer sees the price range and the expected timeline before committing to anything, which ends the counter-side theater where a customer's ignorance sets the price. People with little technical knowledge simply cannot be overcharged the old way anymore.
- Customer, shop, and backoffice platforms sharing one repair lifecycle
- Centrally managed price and time ranges per device and fault, adjustable by region
- Guided fault entry instead of free-form descriptions
- Instant status notifications, including spare part delays
03 Fintech routes around a slow banking system
Payments without the bureaucracy
Germany's digital infrastructure is famously behind its economy, and direct integrations with its banks move at the speed of paperwork. We deliberately avoided that path and connected through payment providers like Mollie and PayPal, reaching a long list of banks through fintech intermediaries and skipping the bureaucracy entirely. The platform got working payments in a fraction of the time a direct integration would have taken.
Invoicing got the same care from the other direction: we worked hand in hand with Mehmet's accountant so that every invoice the system produces is fully compliant. Shops also get their own cash desk management inside the platform, so the money side of a repair lives in the same system as the repair itself.
04 The marketplace that ran as an internal tool before going public
Proven on his own counter first
The project paused for a while when other priorities pulled Mehmet away, and when he came back he made a patient decision: rather than rushing the marketplace open, he ran RepairFinder as the internal management tool for his own repair operation, testing the flows on real customers and real repairs.
After years of taking requests by hand, explaining processes verbally, and fielding endless what-happened-to-my-phone calls, the difference showed immediately. Requests arrive structured, prices and faults are defined, and customers track their own repair status from the system. The two things he values most, by his own telling, are the payment infrastructure and the practicality of the repair request flow, because they dissolved exactly the daily friction he had lived with as a shop owner for years. The internal run also served as the marketplace's proof: the flows that will onboard other shops are the same ones that have been earning their keep on his own counter, and the relationship between us has stayed at its very good level throughout.
05 Built, proven internally, and heading for a national launch
The outcome
The platform was built through 2024 and works end to end. The rollout plan starts in the Köln region, expands to Frankfurt, and continues across all of Germany, with early projections of 2,000 to 3,000 repair requests a month within the first few months of the public launch. Through 2026 Mehmet has been closing the partnership agreements to make that happen, with the marketplace launch targeted for this year.
The relationship, meanwhile, stays warm for a reason. The man who swore off outsourced development after years of nothing now has a finished, working platform that already runs his own operation, a rule set that ends arbitrary pricing for an entire market, and a launch plan measured in regions rather than promises.