Why I Built Yollardayız

The textbook answer to travel planning is: check the conditions before you go. For the sıla yolu — the summer drive from the Netherlands and Germany to Turkey that hundreds of thousands of diaspora families make every year — there was nowhere to check. I built Yollardayız because the biggest variable of a 2,000-plus-kilometre trip, the border, was being planned on Facebook hearsay: a screenshot from Tuesday, a cousin's story from last August, a guess dressed up as advice. Waits at Kapıkule swing from forty minutes to most of a day, and families were choosing their route and departure day on folklore. That gap — a real, recurring, expensive unknown with no data source behind it — is exactly what my product operating system tells me to build against.

The problem I kept seeing

Spend one evening in a Sıla Yolu Facebook group in July and the pattern is unmissable. The same question, dozens of times a day: "Kapıkule nasıl, kaç saat?" And the same answers: somebody's photo of a queue, somebody's memory of last year, somebody's confident wrong guess. The community is generous — people genuinely try to help each other — but goodwill isn't data. A family sitting in Munich deciding whether to leave Thursday night or Friday morning is making a decision worth six hours of queue time with children in the car, and the best available input is anecdote.

The communities own the conversation. The YouTubers own the storytelling. Nobody owned the facts.

The insight

Border waits aren't actually unknowable — they're just unaggregated. National road authorities along the route publish official queue data; travelers crossing right now know exactly how long it took them. What was missing was one place that ingests the official feeds, collects one-tap traveler reports, blends them into a single live number per gate and direction, and shows it with its source and freshness attached. That's the whole product: "hangi kapıdan, ne zaman geçmeliyim?" answered with data.

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The moat isn't the code — it's credibility. Every number on the site carries its source and its age, because one confidently wrong wait time would cost more trust than a hundred right ones earn.

The design choices that matter

The audience shaped every decision. A first-time visitor arrives from a Facebook link, mid-journey, on weak roaming data near a border — so the landing page is the answer, not a hero section: live gate status within seconds, no prompts, no signup wall. Reading is anonymous forever; auth appears only when you contribute a report, with the reason stated. Guidance is comparative, not falsely precise — "divert to Hamzabeyli, ~40 min", never a pretense of minute-level accuracy — and every figure is labeled resmi veri or yolcu raporu with a "last updated" stamp. Building for one narrow, well-understood audience like this is the same discipline as choosing who a product is for — the gurbetçi driver is the only user, and it shows.

The business shape

Yollardayız is deliberately seasonal and deliberately boring underneath: near-zero traffic from October to April, then spikes on July Friday evenings — so it runs on the same Nuxt and Supabase stack as my other products, built for cheap idle and burstable reads. Distribution follows the audience instead of fighting for a new one: the Facebook groups and Sıla Yolu YouTubers already have the attention, so the product meets them there — answer real questions with a live link, offer embeds, let the data do the talking. No ad budget stands a chance against three good partnerships in a community this concentrated.

I built Yollardayız because a decision families make every summer — which gate, and when — deserved a data-backed answer instead of folklore. If you're making that drive, that's what it's for.

See also my product operating system and how I think about distribution as a solo builder.