My first encounter with a computer was at age 10—the era of dial-up internet, when connecting required plugging in the phone cable and hoping no one picked up the landline.
By 12, I was spending most of my time browsing forums and early websites. That’s when my interest in coding first surfaced. In Turkish schools, there’s a concept called the “yearly project.” Instead of handing in a paper assignment, I submitted a small C++ program on a floppy disk. My teacher’s reaction was: “You’ve done everything you weren’t supposed to,” and he called my parents in. After that, they password-locked the computer, and I stayed away from it for two years.
Eventually, I found a way around that restriction. At 14, I applied to write for GamePro magazine—and I got accepted. Seeing my name in print for the first time was indescribable.
From there, I never stopped. I never chased money; I simply experimented. Over the next ten years, I built one failed project after another: gaming sites, hardware sites, tech blogs, forums, guitar sites, music sites, real estate sites—you name it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was accumulating knowledge that would later become my foundation.
My first real breakthrough came with Turkgitar.net. With 300,000 monthly visits, it became Turkey’s largest music news site. By then, I felt I had reached an age where I needed to turn this into something financially meaningful. I moved to Istanbul for the first time, launched an e-commerce store, and brought all major guitar distributors under one roof. But due to financial limitations, I couldn’t sustain it.
Turkgitar was successful as a content platform, but it didn’t make money. After a period of surviving by doing web design work, I had the idea to launch a global metal news site. That’s how Metalheadzone was born—and I applied the exact same method I used on Turkgitar, but in English.
That led to my first major global breakthrough. Then came Rockcelebrities. The channels and websites kept growing. But at some point, I realized the real challenge wasn’t scaling the brands—it was building a system that could operate without me.
The next five years were full of ups and downs, but they strengthened my learning process. During that time, I internalized the core philosophy of The E-Myth and adapted it to my own work.
Today, I’m still running the media business, but my focus has shifted. My next goal is to move into AI SaaS. That’s why I’m currently dedicating my energy to building RockAgent.
