The App Growth Championship, start to finish.
We ran it with RevenueCat in Istanbul in 2026. 200+ teams applied, 20 built for 48 hours in our office, 6 went through to a public growth stage, and the finale in July ended with a $250,000 investment and a flight to New York.
The App Growth Championship is a competition we run with RevenueCat, alongside Anka Ventures, Scate AI, Fal AI, PlusMinusOne and VLMedia. It works in three stages. 200+ teams applied. 20 of them came to our Istanbul office and built for 48 hours straight. A jury cut those 20 down to 6, and the 6 then had two months to take what they had built and grow it in public, in front of everyone, before the finale.
The finale was in July 2026, on a terrace on the Bosphorus. This is what came out of it.
The results
- Kant Labs closed a $250,000 investment from Anka Ventures, announced on stage on finale night.
- AB Ship Lab took the grand prize and a seat at RevenueCat's App Growth Annual in New York.
- Club Bizarre and Bronix shared the market validation award, $10,000 each.
- Club Bizarre also took people's choice, and UpSide took social media engagement.
The team that won had already failed
AB Ship Lab came to the hackathon with an idea, built it over 48 hours, and it did not work. Not in the sense that the code broke. In the sense that nobody wanted it. They could have defended it, because the room was full of judges and defending your idea is what a competition trains you to do. Instead they abandoned it and built something else: SewBuddy, which reached 300 paying users and $10,000 a month inside a month.
That is the part I would want written down, and it is not the part that got reported.
Why the format is 48 hours and then two months
A hackathon on its own selects for demo quality. You get two days of adrenaline, a stage, and a room of people judging something nobody has ever used. The winner is usually whoever presents best, and the thing dies the following week because nobody was ever going to pay for it.
Putting a growth stage after the build changes the question. It stops being what did you make and becomes did anyone want it. That is harder to game, it takes longer to answer, and it is the only one that predicts anything. It is also why AB Ship Lab could throw away 48 hours of work and still win: the format rewarded them for noticing, where a demo day would have rewarded them for pretending.
What the $250,000 does and does not prove
One team raising a quarter of a million dollars off the back of a hackathon is a good outcome and I am not going to pretend it is a small one. It does not prove the competition works. Investment is a bet, and bets are settled years later. What it does prove is narrower and more useful: an investor who watched a team build for 48 hours and then grow in public for two months had enough to decide on, and decided.
That is the thing I would have wanted when I was still trying to start something. Not the money. The chance to be seen doing the work by somebody in a position to act on it.
Finale night
The awards took about forty minutes. The rest of the evening was the part that actually matters and the part nobody schedules: 6 teams who had spent two months in public, a room of founders who had been watching, and investors who had already made up their minds about some of them.
Why we run it
Turkish teams build for the global store from the first day, because there was never a domestic market big enough to hide in. 200+ applications for a competition nobody had heard of the year before is not us being popular. It is what happens when you put a door in front of people who were already building.
It costs us a great deal of time and returns nothing directly. That is fine. We spent six years failing at our own products, and the difference between then and now is not talent. It is that somebody eventually paid attention. Running the thing that pays attention is cheap by comparison.
Everything else written here comes out of the same place: work done for other companies, at a volume that made the patterns visible.
All writing