Behind Serçe: how a very small team got here (and what's still hard)

We wanted to share something we didn't get into in our launch thread: what it's actually been like building Serçe as a very small team.

There are three of us. We've been building Serçe for about two years, went fully live about two months ago, and got onto Google Play about a month ago. No dedicated infra team, no big org behind us — just three people making a lot of calls based on what we could actually build, run, and afford. Self-hosting our own voice/video servers instead of a third-party API was one of those calls, and it's a decision we still stand by.

Something that didn't go as planned: getting local payment infrastructure set up. More than one Turkish payment provider wasn't willing to onboard a brand-new app yet — turns out being young and unproven is its own obstacle, independent of your product. We're still working through it.

Honestly, there hasn't been one big "surprising" moment — just a steady stream of obstacles, and us finding a way through each one. That's mostly what building this has looked like: not a straight line, just consistently showing up and solving the next problem.

If you're building something small with limited resources, or curious what any of this looked like day to day, happy to talk through it.

What's one obstacle that looked purely technical at first, but turned out to be about trust or timing instead?