Startup Istanbul - Join 12,000+ Founders and Investors

I publish a weekly newsletter about building, fundraising, and scaling startups - based on 26+ years of doing it myself across emerging markets.

My goal is to help you pitch better, raise smarter, and avoid the mistakes I’ve seen thousands of founders make.

I’m Burak Buyukdemir. I founded Startup Istanbul and Startup Turkey - events that have processed 220,000+ applications from 170 countries. I’ve invested in hundreds of pre-seed startups and listened to 10,000+ pitches. This newsletter is where I share everything I’ve learned.

Every week, free subscribers get an honest essay about the startup world - hard truths about fundraising, mindset traps, and lessons from the trenches.

Paid subscribers get access to every issue, plus pitch teardowns, downloadable frameworks and templates, exclusive Inside Circle deep-dives, a private WhatsApp group with serious founders, and my full archive of 285+ posts.

If you’re a founder or work at a startup, you can expense this as a learning and development resource. Here’s a template you can send your manager:

“Hi [Manager], I’d like to subscribe to Startup Istanbul ($150/year), a newsletter by Burak Buyukdemir that covers startup fundraising, pitching, and growth strategy. It’s directly relevant to my work and I’d like to expense it as a professional development resource.”

This newsletter is one of my jobs. I put real hours into every post - researching, writing, and sharing what I’ve learned from 26 years of building startups. If you get value from this work and believe in paying people for what they create, a paid subscription is the best way to support it. It keeps this newsletter independent and lets me focus on making it better every week.

Thank you to every paid subscriber who makes this possible.