28 Years on the Internet: My Unfinished Story

I've been doing business on the internet since 1998 — and I'm still just getting started.

Most people tell their origin story once they've "made it." I'm not writing this because I made it. I'm writing it because I look back at 28 years and feel more energy about the next 10 than I've ever felt about any decade before.

It Started With a Directory No One Asked For

The year was 1998. The internet in Turkey was new. Not "early adopter" new — genuinely, confusingly new. Most businesses had no idea what a website was, let alone why they'd need one.

I built TicaretMerkezi.com anyway. A small business directory for Turkish companies. No roadmap, no market research, no investors. Just a hunch that if businesses were going to exist online, someone needed to help them get found.

It got picked up fast. TV coverage, magazine features. Small businesses from all over Turkey were calling — not emailing, calling — asking how to pay to get listed. I was making real money from a website. That feeling never left me. The first time you convert a stranger's attention into income on the internet, something shifts permanently in how you see the world.

One Email Out of Thirty

1999. Pre-Google. If you wanted to find companies online, you were searching Yahoo and AltaVista and copying down email addresses by hand.

I sent 20 to 30 cold emails to international company owners I found that way. Introduced myself. Explained what I could build. No template, no follow-up sequence — just honest outreach from a young guy in Turkey who believed he could make something useful.

Twenty-nine of them never replied.

One did. Harris Chan, from Hong Kong. He asked me to build a simple bulk email delivery tool. I built it in a few weeks and sold it to him. A check arrived by mail 30 to 40 days later. I took it to the bank — and then waited another 40 to 50 days while the bank staff figured out what to do with it. Most people in Turkey at that time genuinely didn't believe you could sell software online to someone in another country and receive a check in the mail. The suspicion was real. I remember standing at that counter thinking: this is going to be a long education.

But the check cleared. And that changed everything.

Falling in Love With Email

I looked at what I'd built for Harris and thought: this has real legs.

I rebuilt it from scratch. Made it better. In February 2000, I launched it publicly at Octeth.com — here's what the site looked like back then, preserved by the Wayback Machine. I ran some ads. Got exposure. And then something happened that I had no framework for at the time.

I started waking up to revenue I didn't earn that day.

Overnight sales. While I slept, someone in Germany or Australia or Canada had found Octeth, decided they wanted it, and paid. The concept of passive income wasn't a buzzword yet — at least not one I'd encountered. It was just: money when you wake up. I fell in love with email marketing the way you fall in love with something that keeps surprising you. Not a crush — a conviction.

Between 2000 and 2007, I kept building. RemotelyDisplay in 2001. KeepSecured, a security tool, in 2002. InnovativeHelpdesk for customer support in 2006. Plus more email marketing software along the way. All of them sold. All of them paid the bills. But Octeth was the flagship — the one I kept improving, kept caring about, kept showing up for.

The SaaS Years — And the Realization That Followed

In 2008, my brother Mert and I founded Sendloop — a cloud-based email marketing platform. Real SaaS, in the early days of SaaS, before "SaaS" was the default assumption for every software product.

Around the same time, Mert built Wridea.com — an online idea-capturing tool. It got some press, got shared, and then something I'd never witnessed before: 10,000+ user signups in under 48 hours. We sat there watching the counter go up and couldn't quite believe it. We fell in love with SaaS.

So we kept building. PreviewMyEmail (launched 2008, acquired in 2013 by SMTP, Inc. — my first exit). SenderSuite. MetricsHQ. In 2015, a group of investors bought a minority stake in Sendloop. My first time working with outside partners. It was fine at first. Then the visions started to diverge.

Between 2015 and 2020, I kept building anyway: IPMonitor, Cleanify, ReferralMagic (which reached #1 on Product Hunt). In 2020, I bought back the investors' shares and became sole owner of Sendloop again. Full circle.

That same year I founded Kayra — a portfolio company designed to acquire micro-software and micro-SaaS businesses. Since then I've added ClickMonk, LaunchMailbox, QuickTests, TraceRank, ContactWidget, DropDuel, MicroSweepGame, FeltKings to the portfolio. In early 2026, DemoPolish.com joined the family.

Every single business I've ever founded is still in the game. Most make money. Some make good money. The portfolio keeps growing.

Small Bets as a Philosophy

I didn't design any of this. I followed curiosity, built what seemed useful, and bet small — often and repeatedly.

I've written about this more formally in this essay, but the short version is this: luck isn't random. You can increase it. The mechanism is volume — more experiments, more surface area, more chances for something to land. Most of your bets lose. That's fine. The ones that win more than make up for it.

Octeth and Sendloop are my giants. Twenty-six years in, Octeth is still the most feature-packed email marketing platform in the market. Sendloop has served tens of thousands of businesses. These aren't small bets anymore — they're the compounded result of small bets that kept paying off.

But alongside them I have 15+ other products and projects, most of them fully profitable, fully bootstrapped, self-funded from day one. No VC, no board, no permission. That portfolio is what keeps me independent. It's what lets me say no to bad deals, take time off when I need it, and make decisions based on what I believe rather than what a cap table requires.

In the world of AI, by the way, making small bets got dramatically easier. The surface area of what one person can build and ship has expanded in ways I still find genuinely exciting to think about.

What 2026–2035 Looks Like From Here

When I run the numbers — 1998 to 2026 — I count over 20 companies, 3 exits, one acquisition spree, one investor buyback, and more failed projects than I can name from memory. That's not a brag. It's just the log of someone who kept swinging.

Here's what I know now that I didn't know in 1998: the compounding isn't in the wins. It's in the staying. Every project teaches you something you use in the next one. Every failure rules out a direction so you can move faster toward the ones that work. The gaps between launches are shorter now. The judgment is sharper. The network is real. The tools — especially in 2026 — are extraordinary.

I'm more excited about the next decade than any decade I've lived through.

The story isn't a retrospective. It's a setup.

If you've been doing something similar — building things, betting small, falling in love with a technology or a market — I'd genuinely love to hear from you. Find me on LinkedIn or reach out directly.