It started in a cafe.
Me and my friends were trying to find a live music event in Atakum. There was no app for this, no website, nothing. My friend was literally scrolling Instagram, checking local cafe profiles one by one to see if any posted about an event. No filter, no search, just manual scrolling.
I noticed the gap that day but didn't do anything. Just sat with the idea.
Then one day I was on my work MacBook, opened Safari, pressed S to search something. Safari suggested sfbay.craigslist.org. I don't know why, never visited it before. But I clicked and just stared at it. Plain HTML, no design, but everything a city needs in one place. Businesses, events, services, housing, jobs. All of it, for one city.
I thought about doing the same for Samsun. Then realized Samsun was too big. I couldn't promote to a whole city alone. But Atakum is where young people are. University students, cafes, small businesses. If I focus just on Atakum I can actually reach people. Small enough to promote, dense enough to matter.
I loved Craigslist's simplicity but I knew university students wouldn't use plain HTML in 2024. So I planned it simple but not that simple, and add features one by one.
First listings weren't businesses mailing me. I scraped public Google data to seed initial content, then went to people I know personally. Friends who own businesses, family connections. Not glamorous but it worked.
Then I made a mistake I don't fully regret. Every feature I added was getting indexed by Google, getting impressions. So I kept adding. Business listings, maps, service ads, event pages, dashboards, analytics. Scope kept growing. What was supposed to be simple became a full platform.
When I decided to build mobile apps I hit the real wall. There was already so much, so many API endpoints, so many features, that building full admin and business console for mobile would take forever. So I made a call: mobile apps cover only the user side. Businesses manage everything from web. Right call but still hurt to accept.
Apple was hard on me because of UGC. User generated content means humans can post things, which means Apple wants moderation systems, reporting flows, content policies. That whole review process was painful.
I launched expecting maybe 5–10 people to find it. First month I had 10x that. I had no expectations and it kept surpassing them. Now it's at 41k monthly impressions. For a local app in one district of one city in Turkey, I wasn't expecting that.