The App Founders New Year Party.

The Neon Apps x RevenueCat App Founders New Year Party ran on Wednesday 24 December 2025, in our own office in Istanbul, from 7 in the evening until 10. Founders, developers, designers and a few investors. Nothing was scheduled except the food.

What there was instead of a programme

• A pool table, which is where most of the evening happened.
• A bingo card with a person on every square, so you had to go and talk to strangers to finish it.
• A photo frame by the tree, which people queued for more than I expected.
• Pizza, arriving in stacks, until nobody could pretend to be hungry.

Why there was no panel

Every industry evening I have been to in this market has a talk in it. The talk is usually fine and it is always the reason the room stops being a room. People sit down, face the same direction, and stop meeting each other for forty minutes, which is the only thing they came for.

So we cut it. No stage, no slides, nobody introducing anybody. The only structure was a game designed to make you talk to somebody you did not know.

The cost of that decision is that nothing about the evening is quotable afterwards. Nobody leaves with a slide. What they leave with is four or five people they can now message, which is the thing a panel was always a substitute for.

The food was not a detail

We ordered an unreasonable number of pizzas and RevenueCat put a sticker on every box. It sounds like nothing. It is the difference between an event people leave at 8 and an event people are still at when you turn the lights up, and I have been to enough of the first kind to stop treating it as a detail.

Who came

People running app companies, people who work at them, and people who left one last year to start another. Almost nobody knew almost anybody. That is normal here and it is the reason the evening exists: Turkish app teams sell into the App Store, so their customers are in Ohio and Jakarta and their competitors are a search result away. They have no reason to be in the same building. Somebody has to put the building up.

The conversations were the same three all night, which is how I know the room was the right one. What is Apple rejecting you for at the moment. What are you paying for installs. Where did you find an engineer. Every one of those is a question everybody in the room had already answered alone, at some cost, and none of them had ever been asked out loud to somebody who had answered it too.

What we get out of it

Nothing directly, and I would rather write that down than let it be inferred. We get standing, we hire out of rooms like this one, and we learn what the market is stuck on months before a report would tell us. The version where a company does this purely out of generosity is not true anywhere and it is not true here.

It is also the one with no agenda at all, and it is the one I would keep.