44

Today I turned 44. And I have never been this close to making a living from my own business, something I had been dreaming about and trying to build since my university years. My Synaps Media adventure, which I started two years ago, has turned into a success story thanks to 20 years of prior experience and a number of other factors that came together at the right time.

Along the way, I have learned a great deal, and I keep learning new things and tackling new challenges every day. But something is different now: every obstacle I get through adds to my knowledge. Instead of the same recurring problems I faced in my previous jobs, I now have fresh and new ones. Recurring problems wear down your motivation. But a problem you are facing for the first time actually gives you a boost of confidence when you solve it.

As a new entrepreneur who has reached a certain level of success, I want to write about a few things I have learned.

Time. Just a little more time.

Successful startup stories on the internet almost always tell us about big achievements reached in a very short time. "I hit $10K MRR in 3 months," "I surpassed my salary in 6 months" — stories like these give us the message that reaching a sustainable income is only possible through scenarios like these. Until I left Trendyol and started trying to build my own business, I used to say the same things. "If I just had a year without needing a salary, I would definitely be earning this much from one of my projects." I also used to say, "Any project that hasn't matched my salary within a year has already failed."

I no longer think that way.

Of course, sometimes it is possible to reach very high income within a year. But from what I have seen, that is the exception, not the rule. And on top of being rare, the real cost behind those stories is rarely shown. Is it realistic for you to do the following in order to reach a very high income goal in a very short time?

• Working 18 hours a day for months, spending less time with family and friends, not being there when they need you
• "Fake it till you make it" — putting fake reviews and made-up numbers on your product page
• Using psychological tricks to turn even people who don't need your product into customers
• Building meaningless or even harmful products just because they have high market potential
• Finding an idea that is "easy to sell," making long-term promises to customers, and then selling the business at the first attractive offer six months later

I know — these are the building blocks of today's marketing industry. Refusing to do them might seem naive. But I believe that when the goal is making money, ethics should not be treated as a minor detail. If life has a purpose, it should not be to earn as much as possible, but to create as much as possible — to create things that are useful for people.

And to do that, you need time. If you are building something genuinely good, you need to give it time to reach people and earn their trust. Especially today, with so much information noise, scattered attention, heavy news cycles, financial worries, and a crisis of trust — even a great project can take a very long time to reach its potential customers.

As someone who is 44 years old and has tried to build close to a hundred projects, I can say this: to know whether a project should be abandoned or continued, you need to give it at least 2 to 3 years and put in the real work during that time.

This is often true even for large, well-funded projects. Between 2009 and 2015, I worked at Sahibinden.com, which was Turkey's leading classifieds site. I was surprised to learn that the site, which launched in 2000, did not become profitable until seven years later. But that determination eventually gave them hundreds of employees and a value of hundreds of millions of dollars. The founders had both money and time. If they had given up after a year of not seeing expected results — like many people do today — Turkey's biggest classifieds site would belong to someone else.

Building a project while working a day job

For people who did not inherit wealth, the biggest challenge of running your own business is simply paying the bills. Working 40 hours a week at a job and then trying to develop a product in your remaining time is genuinely exhausting. Doing this while being married and having kids, without sacrificing something, feels almost impossible.

Until I left Trendyol in 2024, I had been working continuously for nearly 20 years. And for almost all of those 20 years, I had side projects running alongside my main job. There were times I even took time off work to focus on a project. But running a project this way is not sustainable. Something you could finish in two or three months working full time ends up taking a year. That drains your energy and motivation, and it delays the early feedback and small wins that would otherwise keep you going.

I was able to break out of this cycle thanks to a more stable life in the Netherlands, some savings I had built up, and my wife's support. Without those things, Synaps Media would have taken years longer to reach where it is now — if it had gotten here at all. My advice to you: if you don't have enough savings to go without a salary for a while, work toward building that cushion first. Or consider working part-time, or getting support from people close to you — so you can invest in your project in a sustainable and meaningful way.

One important but often overlooked factor is your spending. When I decided to keep going on a limited budget, being much more careful with my expenses gave me a significantly longer runway. Avoiding spending that wouldn't improve my work output and would only shorten how far I could go made a real, visible difference. That is worth thinking about.

Of course, finding an investor is another option that comes up a lot. Honestly, when I looked into the world of startup investment, I realized it wasn't for me. With a few exceptions, when you take investor money, you and your project become just one asset in their portfolio. They are not interested in what you're building, how you're building it, or whether your customers are happy. The only thing they care about is how much their money will grow in one or two years. So when you build with investor funding, you end up in a frantic race that never stops. Even if your project earns enough to sustain you and your team, even if your customers love what you've built, if you can't deliver 2x or 3x returns to your investor next year, your project is doomed. We often see great, useful, well-loved projects go in strange directions — or shut down entirely — simply because they couldn't satisfy their investors.

A successful exit can still be a great outcome for people building these projects. But if, like me, you want to earn a living while also creating something genuinely useful, an investor can become your biggest obstacle over time.

Touching people's lives

The greatest satisfaction my work has given me is reaching people all around the world through the software I build, and helping them create value in their own lives. Even when I worked at Sahibinden.com, I used to feel a real sense of pride hearing strangers on public transit talking about how great the site was. And I was just one of hundreds of people working there.

At Synaps Media, that motivation is at its highest. I host more than 250 websites belonging to nearly 200 people from over 40 countries. I have had conversations with almost all of them. Through those conversations, I have encountered very different worlds and very different perspectives. But there was one thing they all had in common: human emotions. I take genuine pleasure in the fact that what I do feels less like a robotic service and more like a neighborhood shop — professional, yes, but with a personal touch. I try never to forget that I am a human being and that the person on the other side is also an individual living their own busy life. I do my best for them with that in mind. This seems to be noticed, because I now regularly read wonderful comments on social media about both the service and about me personally. Very few things make me happier than that.

If you also find joy in creating useful things, then build things around that. Don't let a small market size discourage you. Of course, evaluating whether the return is worth the effort is a basic requirement for any business. But jumping into projects that have no real value for you or for anyone else — just because a lot of people are throwing money at that space right now — does not seem like a sustainable business model to me.

What's next

I don't want anyone reading this to get the impression that I have completely figured it all out. There is still a lot of ground to cover at Synaps Media. My current goal is for the project's income to reach a level by the end of the year where I no longer need to take on extra work on the side, and to be in a position to bring on a team member to share the load and reduce the risk. The way things are going suggests this is a realistic target.

I will keep doing the best I can, and we will see where things go.