mind girisimcilik-hikayelerim 29-kapi-bizi-hic-tanimiyordu
29 doors didn't know us at all
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“Work usually comes not from the people closest to you but from someone you met once. Code got cheap, but AI can't build those weak ties for you. For that, you still have to get up and go to the door.”
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- EN · AI translation of the TR original
01 · Cooked
What I think about this today.
30 doors in Pendik
In 2019, in Pendik, we knocked on the doors of almost thirty lawyers in a single day. One of them didn’t even have a computer in his office. He was typing on a typewriter and filing everything by hand. And we were trying to sell that old lawyer a website and SEO.
We had a flyer I had designed myself. We had barely a penny in our pockets. Every door gave us the same answer: no. Until the last one.
Kemal’s phone call
Kemal is my friend from high school and my partner today. Back then he was doing a master’s degree at the National Defence University. A position had opened in the academy, he had gone through the interviews, and his scores were very high. But they gave the position to someone with lower scores. He had lived his whole life to become an academic. When he got the news, he called me: “Bro, every road here is closed. Let’s do something.”
I wasn’t in a better place. RengaLux, the jewellery business I had started with my wife, had gone under. I was in the middle of the first big financial collapse of my life. All I had was a brand called SvN Tasarım and just enough knowledge to build websites from ready-made themes. Nothing else came to mind. “Let’s sell websites,” I said.
Professional team, quality service
I built a demo site right away. If you look closely, all the placeholders are Latin. There isn’t a single real sentence on it. I designed a flyer and sent it to print. At the bottom it said “Professional Team, Quality Service”. The team was Kemal and me.
On the first day Kemal went out alone. On the phone he said, “Nobody’s even looking.” I jumped on a minibus and went to him. We went door to door. Some of them practically threw us out, some made fun of us. Two kids, 23 or 24 years old, show up at your door and tell you something. You may not be interested, but that level still makes me sad today.
There was a sentence on the back of the flyer: “You keep working for justice, we’ll make you visible on the internet.” But that day, we weren’t visible anywhere.
The last door
Toward evening I remembered the law office where my brother was an intern. I had met the owner, Mustafa abi, exactly once before. I knew him, he didn’t really know me. We sat down and explained. We closed the deal that day. We got our first job by going door to door.
When we came out, Kemal and I walked along the Pendik seaside. We felt like we had finally gotten somewhere. A light went on for me that day: I could also make money by talking to people face to face. Until then we had always earned online.
After that I started calling myself the “mobile developer”. I posted stories, wrote blog posts, shared on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn post got three likes. But my friends saw those posts and started sending people my way.
Code got cheap, finding work got expensive
This morning Vehbi Emiroğlu’s essay “Masa” (The Desk) arrived. He writes about coding in a small room at a home appliance dealer in the summer after high school. The title: “Code got cheap, finding work got expensive.” The ending: “Get up, get out, find work.”
Reading it, I remembered that day. In 2019 we got up and went door to door. But it wasn’t courage. We had no other way.
The strength of weak ties
Sociology has a name for this. Mark Granovetter studied how people find jobs. He asked people who had found a job through a contact how often they saw that person. Only one in six said “often”. Most said “occasionally” or “rarely”.
So work usually doesn’t come from the people closest to you. Because the people closest to you already know the people you know and the things you know. A new door opens from someone further away.
Today code really did get cheap. The kind of site we tried to sell those lawyers, AI builds in minutes. But it doesn’t build those weak ties for you. It doesn’t go out and create that acquaintance for you.
29 doors didn’t know us at all. The last one barely knew us either. The only difference was that we had met once.
Open questions
- Who are the people you’ve “met once” who could bring you work today, and when did you last get in touch with them?
- As AI makes code cheaper, how much of a job’s value shifts to “who you know”?
Sources
- Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties”, American Journal of Sociology, 1973; and Getting a Job (1974).
- Vehbi Emiroğlu, “Masa” (Execution newsletter, 19 October 2026).
02 · Thesis history
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Current · 19 October 2026
Work usually comes not from the people closest to you but from someone you met once. Code got cheap, but AI can't build those weak ties for you. For that, you still have to get up and go to the door.
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This thesis hasn't changed yet. If it does, the old version stays here, struck through.
03 · Distribution
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04 · Links
- This idea extends Will AI take our jobs? Wrong question. The question is no longer "will AI take our jobs." The question is: what will we do together with AI? Mature
- This idea related Are we rowing for nothing? The effort we put in does pay off somewhere, but usually not right away and not where we expect it; the only real measure is being able to honestly say yes to "did I do everything I could?" Testing
- This idea related You can't grow without a partner What holds a partnership together is not the wins you share but your willingness to risk losing together. Once you succeed, partners are easy to find. The hard part is having someone you can share failure with. Testing
Disagree? Weaken the thesis.
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--- thesis: Work usually comes not from the people closest t... status: testing topic: girisimcilik-hikayelerim published: 2026-10-19 canonical: https://furkanmind.com/en/mind/29-doors-didnt-know-us ---
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