I was 10 when I got my first computer. Not for school — for games. I played everything I could find, and somewhere along the way I started writing about them. By 14, I was contributing to GamePro Turkey, one of the few gaming publications in the country at the time. That wasn’t enough.

At 14, I launched e-oyun — Turkey’s first digital gaming magazine. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I wanted to build something.

Then, at 15, I picked up a guitar.

That was it. Games faded into the background. I practiced constantly, formed a band, and started a guitar review site called gitarinceleme. It didn’t take off. But the instinct — build a platform around something you love — never left.

I went to university in Aydın. Studied, sort of. Mostly I was building. In 2013, I launched Turkgitar.net — a Turkish-language rock and guitar platform. No budget, no team, no industry connections. Just the site and whatever I could write. It grew. Then it grew more. And that became everything that came after.

Turkgitar.net started as a hobby. It became a fight. The establishment publication Headbang had the industry relationships, the print presence, the credibility. We had none of that. We just had better content and a faster internet. Eventually, the traffic numbers made the argument for us.

That taught me something: you don’t need permission to build an audience. You need consistency and a point of view.

So I kept building. Metalheadzone came next — this time in English, this time global. Between 2017 and 2019 we hit 10 million monthly visits, competing directly with Loudwire and Blabbermouth. A rock music site built by one person in Turkey, going head to head with the biggest names in international music media. It worked.

Rockcelebrities.net followed. 4 million monthly visits between 2019 and 2021. Same model, different angle.

Then AI arrived and changed everything about content. I didn’t fight it. I saw where things were going and moved — shifted the focus to video and social media, because that’s where the future of this industry was heading. Today those channels sit at 600K+ followers and over 15 million monthly reach across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

But I kept thinking about the next thing.

Music media taught me how artists are discovered, how they’re marketed, how they’re packaged for an audience. And I watched AI do to music creation what it had already done to content — democratize it completely. Suddenly anyone could make a song. But making a song and releasing it professionally, building an artist identity, getting on Spotify and Apple Music, generating press — that was still a maze.

That’s why I built RockAgent. Not as a tool. As an answer to a question I’d been sitting with for years: what if an independent artist had everything they needed in one place?

AI made it possible. I’m here to build it.