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You can't grow without a partner
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“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.”
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- EN · AI translation of the TR original
01 · Cooked
What I think about this today.
We sank our first project
Kemal and I sank our first project. Then the second, then the third. We sank dozens of them. But we have been partners for eight years.
The first one was a social media project: Patileme. A social network just for animals. Neither of us knew the first thing about coding. I had a little webmaster background, that was it.
The idea came from Sevin, the partnership from a dinner
At the end of 2017 my wife Sevin brought up the idea while we were talking: why not a social network for animals? In December 2017 I bought the patile.me domain for 12.99 TL and got started.
Kemal is my friend from high school. One evening in February or March 2018, Kemal and Tuba, his girlfriend back then and his wife today, were having dinner at our place. Kemal talked about another project he had in mind. Sevin jumped in: “You two would work well together.” We said okay, let’s start and see what happens. That evening after dinner Kemal and I wrote a contract. That piece of paper became the start of a partnership that has now passed eight years.
A social network without code
We were two social scientists. I studied sociology, Kemal studied international relations. We bought a ready-made social network script from CodeCanyon and tinkered with it until it worked. Even the smallest change needed code, and we had none. If we broke something, fixing it meant paying the package’s developers, and there was no money. I don’t think I have ever started a venture with money.
So the site wouldn’t look empty, Kemal found 1,800 photos one day. We each took three or four cat and dog characters. We posted a photo from one account and commented from another. 20 to 30 people signed up, three to five of them used it actively.
Banned over 30 lira
Our only revenue channel was AdSense. Whenever Kemal, Sevin, Tuba and I logged into our accounts, we clicked on the ads now and then. We had built up about 30 lira, roughly 15 dollars at the time. One morning I opened my computer: your account has been closed for violating our policies. That account was in my name and it never opened again. Looking back, it was such a silly move, but you can’t see it at the time. Don’t do things like that.
Then we tried a mobile app. We managed to publish the Android app on Google Play, but the Apple app we fought with on my wife’s MacBook Air never went live. Emailing the package’s seller, I didn’t even know what I was explaining. He kept saying “it works on my end.”
You can’t grow without a partner
We sank this project. But having someone next to you while you build, especially a close friend, makes a difference. There is a line I love from Kurtlar Vadisi: you can grow up without a mother, but you can’t grow without a partner. There is a limit to what you can do without a partner.
We tend to think partnership is what keeps successful ventures going. For us it is the opposite. We have dozens, maybe close to a hundred failures, and we keep going with them. Once you succeed, you will find partners anyway. The hard part is having a partner who will own failure with you.
For me growing has two meanings: growing materially and growing as a person. I think I made the right choice on both.
Being willing to lose together
What kept us together was not the work we won, but being willing to risk losing together. We will probably have dozens more failures in the coming years, but we will keep trying. The point is not success or failure. It is having companions you can share both with. Everything else can be fixed.
Open questions
- Can you tell before you start whether a partnership can survive failure?
- Without that first contract, would this partnership have made it this far?
02 · Thesis history
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Current · 9 October 2026
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.
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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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--- thesis: What holds a partnership together is not the win... status: testing published: 2026-10-09 canonical: https://furkanmind.com/en/mind/you-cant-grow-without-a-partner ---
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