How a guy from Turkmenistan created an e-commerce platform for national clothing and attracted 50,000 users

Kadyrberdi Nurbekov, city — Ashgabat, founder of Bezen startup, LinkedIn

How it all began

By my first education, I am a doctor — I graduated from a medical university in Belarus. However, without completing my residency, I realized that my true passion is information technology. I studied web development and together with my current co-founder of Bezen, Islam Akmyradov, during the pandemic, we created our first platform — an online project called Ýolbelet, dedicated to modern education. For two years, we helped young people gain up-to-date knowledge during a time when the whole world was learning and working remotely.

After returning to Turkmenistan, we wondered what kind of startup our country needed. To find the answer, we analyzed the search queries of residents through Google Trends. It turned out that people were most interested in music, movies, news, and national fashion. For most of these areas, solutions already existed, but the market for national clothing was hardly digitized.

We decided to study the problem more deeply and talked to our wives, mothers, and sisters. That’s when we realized how complicated the process of buying national clothing is: first, you need to find the right fabric, then choose a style, then find a good tailor who will sew the dress well and on time, and after that, go through a fitting. Even if everything goes perfectly, it takes at least two weeks to make one dress.

Startup launch

In the fall of 2023, Islam and I became participants in Harman Consulting’s six-month program. The knowledge we gained there became a solid foundation for launching Bezen.

During the training, we registered the company, purchased a server, and a domain. Initially, we wanted to use the address bezen.com.tm, but it was unavailable, so we launched under the domain fasonlar.com.tm.

In February 2024, we took first place in a startup competition and attracted our first investor. The first employee was backend developer Oraz Orazov, and by 2024, we launched the web platform. A year later, a Flutter developer joined the team, and in 2025, we released the mobile application.

Later came TechCrunch Road to Battlefield, the Startup Academy incubation program, and selection as one of two startups representing Turkmenistan at Digital Startup Uzbekistan.

First users and growth

Our initial analysis was fully confirmed. The most interesting thing is that since the launch, we have hardly invested in large-scale marketing: high demand for national styles and strong SEO optimization of the platform did their job.

For over a year now, the site fasonlar.com.tm has consistently been among the most visited sites created in Turkmenistan. Today, the platform is used monthly by about 50,000 active users. Also, more than 200 business accounts are registered on it — these are tailors, ateliers, fashion brands, and clothing manufacturers.

From my experience, investors are interested not in the idea itself, but in real numbers: how monetization works, what the current revenue is, how many users and sellers there are, what the MAU is, and what percentage of users return.

The main indicator that a startup is needed by the market is constant users, not the number of registrations or downloads.

Difficulties

Like most startups, our main difficulty has been and remains sales. Creating a good product is only half the battle. It’s much harder to make sure that customers are willing to pay for it regularly.

So my main advice to beginner entrepreneurs is to think about monetization first, and only then about product development.

After the launch, we mainly focused on marketing, but the startup itself changed its positioning several times during that period and went through rebranding. Each time, we had to explain to the market what Bezen was again. We realized that investing in promotion while the product continues to change is not always effective.

Today, we actively use AI in design and software development. Redesign or even full rebranding takes much less time than it did a few years ago.

But there is also the flip side: with the spread of vibe coding, the number of new projects has sharply increased. Creating products has become easier, but that doesn’t mean it’s easier to build a successful business.

The real challenge today is no longer development, but attracting users, retaining them, and having a working monetization model.

Plans

Right now, we are turning Bezen into a full-fledged e-commerce platform. By the end of the year, we plan to achieve a sustainable business model and stable revenue.

The next step is expanding into Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and then into other countries of Central Asia and the Middle East.