I created a website specifically for my laziness.

Ahmed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:03:52 +0000

I built an AI tool to write LinkedIn posts.

And nobody cared.

Let me tell you the full story because I think it matters.

Three months ago I was sitting in my apartment at 2 AM, convinced I had found a gap in the market. I was spending hours every week trying to write LinkedIn content for my own brand. Staring at blank screens. Rewriting the same sentence fourteen times. Watching other founders post effortlessly while I struggled to string together three coherent paragraphs.

So I thought, what if I just build something to fix this. An AI-powered web app that helps people create LinkedIn posts faster. Smart templates. Tone selection. Hook generators. The whole package.

I went heads down for weeks. Designed the UI. Built the backend. Integrated the AI models. Tweaked the prompts until the output actually sounded human. I was proud of it. Genuinely proud.

Then I launched it.

Crickets.

Not the dramatic kind where you get hate or pushback. The worse kind. Silence. A few sign-ups from friends who never came back. A couple of polite messages saying it looked cool. Zero paying users in the first two weeks.

Here is what I got wrong and I am sharing this because I see other founders making the same mistakes right now.

First, I built in isolation. I never once asked my target audience what they actually needed. I assumed my own pain point was universal. It was not. Some people wanted help with ideas, not full posts. Some wanted editing, not generation. I built for a version of the customer that only existed in my head.

Second, I launched without distribution. I had no audience. No email list. No community. I just put it out there and expected the product to speak for itself. Products do not speak. People do. And I had nobody speaking for mine.

Third, I underestimated how crowded the space already was. There are dozens of LinkedIn content tools. Some backed by real teams with real budgets. I did not take five minutes to ask myself what makes mine genuinely different. The honest answer at launch was nothing.

So what did I do next.

I stopped building features and started having conversations. I reached out to fifty founders and content creators. I asked them to use the tool and tell me everything that was broken, confusing, or unnecessary. The feedback was brutal and exactly what I needed.

I started posting on LinkedIn myself, using my own tool, sharing the messy behind-the-scenes journey. That raw honesty attracted more users than any feature ever did.

Slowly things started shifting. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But the kind of slow traction that actually means something because it is built on real feedback from real people.

The tool is still early. I am still figuring it out. I am not writing this as a success story. I am writing this as a founder who made every classic mistake in the playbook and is trying to learn from each one in public.

If you are building something right now and you have not talked to a single potential customer this week, close your code editor and open a conversation instead.

That is the lesson I paid for with three months of my time.

What is the biggest mistake you made early in building your product? I would genuinely love to hear it.

I Built a Flutter Package for Turkish-Specific Form Validation

Ahmed — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:45:02 +0000

I Built a Flutter Package for Turkish-Specific Form Validation

If you've ever built a Flutter app targeting Turkish users, you know the pain.

You need to validate a TC Kimlik No — there's no package for that. You need to format a Turkish IBAN — you end up writing your own regex. You want a proper ₺1.250,50 currency format — good luck finding something ready-made.

So I built it myself: turkish_validators

What's inside

✅ TC Kimlik No Validation

TC Kimlik No has a real checksum algorithm behind it — it's not just "is it 11 digits." This package validates the full algorithm:

bool isValid = TcKimlik.validate('12345678901');

// Drop it straight into a TextFormField
TextFormField(
  validator: TcKimlik.formValidator,
)

✅ Turkish IBAN (MOD-97)

Validates TR IBANs using the MOD-97 standard and formats them for display:

bool isValid = TurkishIban.validate('TR330006100519786457841326');

String formatted = TurkishIban.format('TR330006100519786457841326');
// → TR33 0006 1005 1978 6457 8413 26

TextFormField(
  validator: TurkishIban.formValidator,
)

✅ Turkish Phone Number

Handles both 0532... and +9053... formats, plus clean formatting for display:

bool isValid = TurkishPhone.validate('05321234567');   // true
bool isValid2 = TurkishPhone.validate('+905321234567'); // true

String formatted = TurkishPhone.format('05321234567');
// → 0532 123 45 67

✅ Turkish Lira Formatting

Proper Turkish number format with dot-as-thousands and comma-as-decimal:

String price = TurkishLira.format(1250.5);
// → ₺1.250,50

String price2 = TurkishLira.format(1250.5, showSymbol: false);
// → 1.250,50

double? amount = TurkishLira.parse('₺1.250,50');
// → 1250.50

Installation

dependencies:
  turkish_validators: ^0.0.3

That's it. No extra dependencies — just Flutter.

Why I built this

I kept rewriting the same validators across different projects. TC Kimlik alone has a non-trivial algorithm that I was copy-pasting between apps. IBAN formatting was always a manual job. At some point it just made sense to package it properly.

The Turkish Flutter ecosystem has a lot of talented developers but not many locale-specific utilities. Hopefully this saves someone a few hours.

DEV Community: Ahmed

I created a website specifically for my laziness.

I Built a Flutter Package for Turkish-Specific Form Validation

I Built a Flutter Package for Turkish-Specific Form Validation

What's inside

✅ TC Kimlik No Validation

✅ Turkish IBAN (MOD-97)

✅ Turkish Phone Number

✅ Turkish Lira Formatting

Installation

Why I built this

Links