When Targowisko.pl went online in 2011, its first listing was a used bicycle in Poznań. The seller wanted 220 złoty and asked to be called after 6 p.m. Marta Kowalczyk, then 28 and building websites for local shops on contract, posted it herself to test the form. Fifteen years on, the site carries about 40,000 active listings a month, and Kowalczyk, 43, still runs it.
Three apps have come and gone over the same stretch. A local delivery startup, a classifieds app backed by a German fund, and a venture-backed furniture resale platform each launched with press and money and closed within three years. The listings site outlasted all of them. Its survival comes down to choices that look dull on paper.
A narrow catalogue
Targowisko.pl sells nothing itself. It takes listings in eight categories: furniture, bikes, tools, garden equipment, cars, motorbikes, boats, and building materials. Kowalczyk turned away phones and clothing early. “The big platforms have those,” she said. “I wanted heavy things that people buy within 30 kilometers of home.”
That filter shaped the buyers too. Someone shopping for a table saw or a rowing machine checks a classifieds site first, because scanning 200 listings beats scanning 20,000. A narrow catalogue made search useful at low volume, and low volume is where a site like this lives.
Traffic barely moves and Kowalczyk prefers it that way. The site’s 310,000 monthly page views cost almost nothing to serve, and the buyers who arrive want one specific machine or piece of furniture. Seasonality is mild. Furniture peaks in September when students move, garden equipment peaks in April, and the flat weeks in between are covered by dealer subscriptions.
The money came later than the traffic
Revenue took four years to matter. Paid bumps (12 złoty to move a listing to the top of its category for seven days) started in 2013 and now supply most of the income. Featured slots for car dealers followed in 2017. Last year the site billed about 640,000 złoty, roughly $160,000, with two part-time moderators and a hosting bill under $90 a month.
Her competitors spent their way to traffic. Kowalczyk spent nothing on advertising for six years. “We ranked in Google because the pages loaded fast and the titles were plain,” she said. The venture-backed app outbid her on every keyword in 2019 and shut down in 2021.
What the apps got wrong
Delivery sounds like a feature. For a table saw in Poznań it is a cost. Buyers on Targowisko.pl collect in person about 90 percent of the time, which keeps disputes near zero and keeps the operator out of the payment until 2022, when card payments for bumps arrived through a Polish processor.
The apps also chased supply that never converted. An app with 500,000 downloads and thin listings loses to a site with 40,000 listings and buyers who pick up the phone. Kowalczyk measures the business in calls per day. That number has held between 300 and 500 since 2016.
None of this makes the site untouchable. Facebook Marketplace took a bite out of furniture listings after 2018, and Kowalczyk answered with a verified-seller badge for dealers who pay monthly. The badge costs 180 złoty and brings in about 9,000 a month.
Operators who find her at trade meetups ask about apps. She tells them the site works in a browser, and that her users are 35 to 65 and know what a browser is. Then she goes back to the moderation queue.