As a small company, I wish we could get together more often. Then we could do more for our employee #002, Dilek, and have a cake together for her birthday.
We’ll have cake, Dilek, even if it’s in her absence. Don’t worry, because tomorrow is our twins Ömer and Faruk’s birthday too. Actually, it’s the next day, but they have school that day.
Happy birthday, Dilek.
How is it possible that we haven’t shared our new office yet? Yes, we have been working at the Başakşehir Living Lab (BLL) building for almost a year now. It’s an innovation center supported by the municipality. The building belongs to the Başakşehir Municipality, and they provide us with solid office space, a powerful internet connection, cleaning services, and fresh black tea (our official drink) — all for free!
Because there are many companies alongside us, we have the chance to meet new people, build friendships, and even steal a few interns from time to time.
The building is open 24/7 with security. I can stay as long as I want to finish work, and I don’t have to worry about deliveries.
One of the companies here is an electric charging company. They even have charging stations in the parking area — so we can charge our car while we’re busy working.
BLL is not only for companies. There are 4–5 different computer labs, and the municipality is very proactive about educational events. They organize programming, robotics, and design courses for all levels — kids, students, and adults. There’s also a professional YouTube studio in the building where people learn how to create videos and become YouTubers.
They even have a game lab — a very cool and interesting room where they organize gaming contests from time to time.
Besides that, there are companies working on robotics, food machines, vending solutions, and more.
At the entrance, there’s a library, and on the top floor, a huge terrace where parties can be held (and hopefully, we’ll host one soon!).
I especially want to thank my old friend and colleague Soner, who first introduced me to this opportunity. I also want to thank many others I’ve met here — like Ceyda — and even those I haven’t properly met yet, like the bosses.
This is truly a dream office for me. And I hope to soon prepare an office like this one for my growing team and company.
Our company is growing — we are now a team of seven!
After a long and quiet summer, schools have reopened and students are filling up libraries again. Last year, we made big promises for our major product Kitapi, the social library management platform, and the time to deliver has finally arrived. With this extra power in our team, we feel like a fully charged electric car — no gears needed, just hit the pedal and go. Which, in fact, we already did.
After this long opening, let me introduce our team.
There’s Dilek, still our Chief Creative Officer. She was on a temporary summer break but is now back with us, sharing cool posts on our social media accounts.
And there’s Şahika, my lovely wife, who started her own spin-off brand. At first, she only had a dream and some supplies. Soon, our house was full of boxes and shiny “things” on every couch. She even began billing customers under Kodventure. Her business grew so fast that we decided to establish a separate company for her brand Sahi. Our trusted accountant and friend encouraged us to do that (of course, with the promise of extra payment — more business, more work, more payment!).
Now, let’s talk about our new members.
The first is Remle. I met her while she was interning at another company — and we kind of stole her. She needed a final project for her internship, and we offered her the task of building Kitapi’s new landing page. We only had a dummy template, but as a front-end developer and final-year Computer Engineering student, she finished it in no time. She also completed one of our most important promises: implementing HTML tagging for blind users. She wants to pursue a career in front-end development, and we welcomed her with open arms.
And now, before you start thinking this will be another women-dominated tech company, let me introduce the Salamanca Twins (well, not real twins, but close enough): Doğukan and Mehmet. They are not brothers but long-time university friends. They interned with us last year, and this year they joined as full-time developers after graduating in Computer Engineering.
Mehmet is a mobile developer, capable of building apps for both iOS and Android. He’s currently working on our new KitPad app, which will be more than just a kiosk device — it will bring many new features to Kitapi users.
Doğukan is our Laravel developer. His name literally means “fresh blood from the east,” and he has already almost finished the new API package of Kitapi.
Young, talented, and full of energy, they are already making a huge impact.
Wait a second! At the top I said we are seven. You did the math and probably counted six. Where is the last person of the team? That is Sefa — my cousin, my only business partner, and the co-founder of Kitapi. We started Kitapi together ten years ago. He is also a Turkish teacher in a public school, and Kitapi’s very first pilot was run in his school library. He still uses it today. Because he is a public officer, we don’t share his name openly, but he has always been and still is part of the team.
That’s all for now — my battery is running out (not the computer’s, mine!).
Stay tuned for the Kitapi app launch!
We are excited to welcome Dilek as our new Chief Creative Officer (CCO) at Kodventure. With a strong vision and passion for technology, he will play a key role in shaping our Kitapi and future projects. Looking forward to an inspiring journey together! 🚀
We have obtained our trademark registration for our previously mentioned TripGames project. Even though we’re currently quite busy with the second version of our Kitapi project, we are eagerly looking forward to entering the gaming world with TripGames. Initially, we will develop games for Turkey’s electric car, Togg, and later bring them to iOS and Android platforms as well.
During the couple of months that Kitapi was offline, we received countless calls and messages asking, “When will it be back?” Our answer was always, “As soon as the schools reopen.” While our core features were ready, our store and landing page were not quite finished, which led to the delay. Finally, the day schools were set to reopen arrived, and in keeping with our promise, we launched the new version of Kitapi, even if it was in a bit of a rush. Our landing page and store are still not fully polished, but Kitapi itself is running smoothly!
With this new version, we think we’ve surprised our users a bit. For the past nine years, Kitapi has been offered completely free of charge. Now, we have introduced two subscription options: “Free” and “Professional Plan.” Unfortunately, this change was necessary to ensure the sustainability of the project and to keep Kitapi thriving for many more years to come. The Professional Plan offers our users an ad-free and significantly faster Kitapi experience.
To show our appreciation, we are giving all our current and new users a free 3-day trial of the Pro Plan. We hope you enjoy it!
With the new version, we now also have multi-language support, which means we are ready to expand Kitapi beyond our borders. The English version is already live, and we plan to add Russian, Bosnian, Albanian, and German soon.
Of course, there are still many areas where Kitapi can improve, and we are working diligently to enhance the platform.
Thank you for your continued support, and we hope you love the new Kitapi!
Something new is happening…
We sold our old cars, a 2006 Mercedes Vito and a 2016 Kia Soul, and decided to pass the electric car world.
Our new car is a Togg T10X. Togg is a brand-new Turkish car company. The T10X is an SUV and the company calls this vehicle not only a car but a “device”. Because it has 4 big screens, multiple cameras, and sensors it deserves the adjective. T10X has an Android operating system inside.
With this new car, we not only moved into the world of electric cars, but as a company, we also decided to move into the world of gaming. We want to develop our games for Togg’s app ecosystem first. Then we will extend our games to both the AppStore and Google Play Store.
What do we have now?
We have a new trademark: Trip Games. It is fresh out of the oven. My first and only employee, which is my wife, made this. We have been developing the games for two weeks. We will take the cars from the distribution center, tomorrow. If we see the manager of the factory’s software team then we can sign a protocol to prepare the car for the developing purpose.
We are very excited about these. Let’s see what will happen.
Finally, we had the meeting #1. It had been waiting for a long time. Believe it or not, as family-based company workers, it is hard to get together. Even if it is a “home office”. Actually, we wanted to make the meeting outside. Long story short, we made it.
What we talked about can be shrunk into three letters: KGB. Don’t worry, I’ll explain below.
The K (Kitapi): the most important project for us and the main reason we started this company. It has 3 main parts: the web app, the social media side, and the mobile apps and we are almost finished first two. Our very first employee will analyze this project and put together all the shortcomings to a list. Then she will force me to finish the list of items.
The G (Gooo.to): We want to make this little side project to global. It has a quite good domain. We also believe that it has a good potential. We’ll search the our competitors in the market (again) and try to make this little fella to be different from others.
The B (Blogs): We have several blogs that we mentioned before. One of them is kadinsanat.net (KS) and this one gets some income for months. This one has been controlled by my wife (employee #1) since the beginning. We like blogs but they are not producing income like KS. We want her to manage all the blogs we have.
Now, her time.
Wow, it feels like a lifetime since our last post, doesn’t it? But fear not, change is in the air. We’re thrilled to introduce our newest team member, who happens to be our #1 employee and a blogging extraordinaire. And no, it’s not just because she’s my wife; I’m confident that she can handle any social media task better than anyone else. How do I know? Well, her personal blog, which is kind of belongs to our company, rakes in about 70% of her salary.
Blogging isn’t her only forte. She also wears the hats of our product manager, social media manager, and graphic designer.
I can already see Kodventure taking leaps and bounds with her on board. Thank you, my dear, for joining us on this adventure. Welcome to Kodventure!
As we have added CURL support for our gooo.to project why don’t we try to make a CURL-based Wordle? Actually, we did it.
There is only one thing about the game: it is Turkish. It took only one day to finish. We can add something to do it better but it seems ok now. You can use it like:
CURL wrdle.org/WORD