Aveny is run from Bursa. Not Istanbul, not Berlin, not somewhere with a startup district and a coworking space full of people building the same thing. A mid-sized city in Turkey that nobody would list in an article about where to start a software company.
I started it at nineteen. Both of those facts used to feel like things I should downplay, and the honest version of this post is about why they stopped feeling that way — and also where they still genuinely cost something, because building a startup outside Silicon Valley is not the frictionless story that gets posted on LinkedIn.
It started with client work, like most studios do
There was no funding round and no idea worth funding at the start. There were clients: digital media projects, B2B platforms, the kind of work where someone brings a brief and you bring execution. That is how most small studios begin and it is not glamorous, but it does something a seed round does not — it forces you to be useful to a real person paying real money before you are allowed to have opinions about product.
Client work also happens to be geography-neutral in a way that surprised me early on. Nobody who hired us asked where the office was. They asked whether the work was good, whether it would ship on time, and whether we would still answer messages after the invoice was paid. Location came up occasionally as small talk, never as a decision factor.
The parts that are genuinely harder
Here is where I want to be more honest than the usual version of this post.
Time zones are a real tax, not a minor inconvenience. Working with clients in Western Europe is fine. Working with anyone in North America means your evening is their morning, and the good conversations — the loose, unscheduled ones where the actual thinking happens — land at hours that quietly reshape your life. You can absorb that for a while. It compounds.
You do not get the ambient network. In a dense startup city, useful information reaches you by accident: someone mentions a tool at dinner, a former colleague warns you about a client, you overhear how a deal was structured. Outside of that, every piece of that information has to be sought deliberately. It is available — it is just never free. You pay for it in effort, and if you are not disciplined about seeking it out, you simply do not get it.
Credibility takes longer to establish. Not because anyone is hostile, but because the default assumption when a company has no recognizable address and a founder with no track record is that it is small and temporary. Both were true. The only fix is a body of work that outlasts the assumption, and that takes years, not months.
Being young is a compounding version of the same problem. At nineteen, you are not being judged on your work yet — you are being judged on whether you will still be doing this in two years. That is a fair question. The only answer is time.
What actually changed the equation
The obvious answer is remote work becoming normal, and that is part of it, but the more specific change is that the tooling gap closed. The infrastructure a small studio in a mid-sized city can access today is the same infrastructure anyone else can access: the same deployment platforms, the same design tools, the same distribution channels, the same App Store that does not care where a build was compiled.
AI tooling extended that further. Not because it writes the product — it does not, and we wrote a whole post on why judgment is the part that stays human — but because it collapsed the research gap. The thing that used to require a senior person nearby to ask, or a network to tap, is now something you can work through alone at two in the morning. For someone building without a local peer group, that is not a productivity feature. It is closer to access.
Voisary is the test of whether all of this holds. It is a product built for people who have no idea where it was made, sold in a store that lists it next to apps from companies with a thousand employees, judged on whether it works. If location still mattered structurally, that is where it would show up.
If you are somewhere similar
The advice I would give my nineteen-year-old self is not "location does not matter" — it does, just not in the direction people assume. It does not limit what you can build or who you can sell to. It limits what reaches you by accident, which means you have to go get it on purpose: read more, ask more, reach out to people you have no reason to expect a reply from.
Start with work that pays, because it buys you the years you need. Be honest that some of it is harder from here. And then build the thing anyway, because the part that actually gates you is not the city on your invoice.