LiseUPLiseUP

In Turkey there was nowhere to go if you wanted to build something while still at school. University incubators have age floors, accelerators expect an existing company, and mentor networks run closed. We started LiseUP for exactly that gap: a programme connecting founders aged 14–18 with mentorship, team matching, micro-funding and investor access. The hard part was never the platform; it had to convince two audiences at once: a teenager asking "is this for me?", and a mentor weighing whether it's serious.

We compressed the positioning into a single line, "For Those Who Make the Rules", and every interface decision came out from under it. Nothing loses a young audience faster than being patronised, so the tone stayed adult and the pacing quick: no mascots, no exclamation marks, no "fun" copy. The design and the code came from one hand, so nothing was lost in translation between the positioning and the pixels.

• Next.js App Router, deployed on Vercel
• Application flow with waitlist integration
• Separate entry paths for students, mentors and investors
• Mobile-first: nearly the entire audience arrives on a phone

liseup.org is live, with over 500 young founders on the waitlist. That number came from the programme itself rather than a marketing push, which is the part that actually says the thing we built was needed.