Trendoline won the Y2FI startup competition in Turkey last month. Seed investment, a lot of handshakes, and a plan to expand to the US.
I want to write down what the experience was actually like, before the narrative hardens into something cleaner than the truth.
What winning feels like
Good, briefly. Then the weight of what comes next settles in and the win becomes a starting gun rather than a finish line.
The prize money feels like a lot until you start thinking about what it actually needs to cover. Salaries, infrastructure, travel, legal, all of it adds up faster than the spreadsheet suggests when you first build it.
What the competition tested and what it didn't
The pitch process tests how well you can explain your idea under pressure. It tests whether you can answer hard questions without flinching. It does not test whether your product works, whether users want it, or whether the business model holds up over time.
Winning is validation that you can pitch. That's a real skill and it matters. But it's easy to confuse it with validation that you're building the right thing, and those are different.
The advice you get after winning
Lots of it, from people you've just met, with confidence proportional to how little they know about your specific situation. Filter aggressively.
The useful advice came from people who had built something similar in a similar context and were willing to talk about what actually went wrong. There aren't many of those conversations but they're worth more than a hundred conference panels.
What we're doing with the money
Expanding to the US is the goal. The Turkish market validated the concept but the scale we're thinking about requires being in a bigger ecosystem. We've also won the Microsoft BizSpark programme which unlocks a significant amount in Azure credits, so infrastructure costs are covered for a while.
The next few months are about finding out whether what works in Turkey works somewhere else. That's the actual test.
With gusto, Fatih.