The meetup, on a boat on the Bosphorus.

We ran it in November 2025, the same week the RevenueCat partnership was announced. A boat, an afternoon on the Bosphorus, and an open invitation to people who build apps in this country. More than 100 founders and investors came, which is the figure in RevenueCat's own write-up of it.

We had been braced for the other version of a first event, the one where you cater for 80 and 30 people turn up. It did not happen.

Why a boat

Because you cannot leave one. That is the whole design. A meetup in a venue empties in stages: people arrive, do the two conversations they came for, and go. On a boat everybody is there for the same three hours whether the first conversation went well or not, and the second and third ones are the reason to run the thing at all.

It also costs about what a decent venue costs, in a city where the view is the one thing you never have to pay extra for.

Why the room did not already exist

If your market is domestic you meet your peers by accident. There are trade bodies, industry nights, conferences with your own customers in them. Turkish app teams have none of that, because the market they sell into is the App Store: their customers are in Ohio and Jakarta, and their competitors are a search result away and have never been in the same country.

So a generation of people who ship worldwide by default grew up not knowing each other. Everybody was answering the same paywall question and reading the same rejection letter alone. For a country with this many app teams in it, that is a lot of duplicated pain.

What it cost and what it returned

It cost a day of six people's time and the price of the boat. It returned no revenue, three hires over the following year, and a fairly accurate picture of what this market is stuck on, which is worth more than it sounds and is the thing no report gets to in time.

We have run something every few months since. The party in December was the next one, and it is the one I would keep.