Samet Yıldız on order before tools, and learning how to learn

Hi everyone, what episode number is this, Barış? We don't really number them anymore, but... fourteen, thirteen, yeah. Somewhere around there. We don't put episode numbers anymore, but hello everyone from the latest, newest episode. Today's guest is Samet Yıldız from Monster Technology, Monster Notebook. Hi Samet, how are you? Hi, doing well. Honestly, you two should be asked that. Great, honestly. Hi Barış, how are you? Hi. I'm doing really well, honestly excited. We've already been chatting for half an hour or so. So much has already come up that I'm curious what's still ahead.

Honestly, we picked a topic, but we can also go completely off the rails if we want. Samet and I had been meaning to get together for a while, but had to push it back because of his notary business. Was that because of my notary business, or because of a friend of ours who had a flight to Spain? It was really more about how busy things were, we just couldn't manage it, couldn't get together. Exactly that. I'm joking of course, that one's on us. But anyway, we managed to get together now, and that's nice.

Should I open with something on that front then? Actually, talking with Samet earlier today, he raised a really good point. Given the industry we're in and the general state of things, conversations inevitably tend to stay stuck on the past and the present. Like, say, back to school is here, what are we going to do, or Black Friday's coming up, what are we going to do? What happened to you in the past, and so on. But we said, let's also talk about further ahead this time.

So, what kinds of investments can we start making now for three years from now, four years from now? I'd love to hear both our own product perspective on what Hardal is planning to do, and Samet's side, what kind of investments he's actually making. Let me also add, as a footnote, why this question is worth asking. When Samet and I first met, we had a meeting about Hardal working on server-side and so on. We explained Hardal. Samet explained what he was doing at the time and what he wanted to do.

And at that point, Samet was already doing everything Hardal could offer. So six months later, when we said, look, we're doing these things now too, Samet said, okay, now we can actually work together. That's why, as someone who moves through the industry in a planned, structured way and closely tracks updates, I'd love to hear what he's planning, what he's investing in. First of all, thanks for the kind words, but I genuinely remember the moment of that first meeting. Here's what happened, we sat down, we're talking to each other, and he said, we're doing this and this, what are you doing?

I said, we're doing this and this too. And we just kind of looked at each other, both of us realising in that moment that we weren't going to end up working together, and it just turned into, so, how are you, how's it going, that kind of thing. Then time passed, some of our needs changed, some developments happened on the Hardal side, and eventually we ended up coming together. We started working together. Actually, funnily enough, before we even went live today and were trying to figure out a topic, it turned out the topic itself, at its core, was us starting to work together.

Because here's what happened, we already knew what we were currently working on, we'd already planned our plans for the future, and while trying to get somewhere, we said, look, while we're planning the future here, let's also start working with Hardal along the way. Let's sort this part out this way, let's do these integrations here. So actually, what we ended up talking about was, while we were planning 2026, you got folded into this project back in 2025. Because especially for people whose work revolves around data, you can't just think about today, you need to think about the future and build your integrations, your work, your preparations accordingly.

Because we already knew five years ago that cookies would be phased out, but as an entire digital industry, as every technology partner, we resisted it for as long as we could, for five years. Browsers resisted, operating systems resisted, everyone resisted to the maximum extent possible. But the endpoint was obvious from the start. This is part of it too, honestly. We really need to see the future coming and not run from it. We need to take our precautions ahead of time accordingly. We need to do the work accordingly.

What are we doing as Monster? Honestly, the first thing we did was about data. Because everyone talks about AI a lot these days, but to actually use AI you need the right data. You simply can't get anywhere good from an analysis built on the wrong data, unfortunately. So the first thing we did was clean that up. We started drawing up our plans for the future. And right now we've actually already started working towards wherever we'll be heading in 2026, maybe 2027. A lot has happened on my end too.

Let me pass this over to Berkay a bit too. There's something worth saying here. We're planning this, but we're actually planning it together with all our partners. Like, the other day I was talking to Berkay on the phone, or talking to Barış, and I'd say, could we add this, this and this to Hardal, could we do this? Because here's the thing. This is a need, but it's not just my need as Samet. It's a whole chain of needs that emerges in front of us, driven by these tools or this technology.

And we adapt accordingly. Everyone has a business plan ahead of them. Everyone has their own plan and programme. We want to identify the needs accordingly and fill in every gap here. But of course we run into problems. Sometimes technical ones. Sometimes we run into serious time pressure. But there's a point we're all trying to reach, in the end everyone has some point they're trying to get to. Where do you want to be in 2026? What state do you want to be in? How do you want to be positioned in 2027?

What features do you want to add to the product? You do plan these out somehow. But we can run into some growing pains actually putting them into practice. Actually, let me add something here. Let me translate this conversation into more everyday language a bit, since some listeners might be thinking, what are they even talking about. What you're describing is that regulatory and technological gaps disrupt certain businesses, certain companies, especially in web and mobile measurement. Things like Safari blocking trackers, Firefox blocking UTM parameters, naturally put people in a tougher spot when it comes to campaign optimisation.

Honestly, the measurement strategy you built over at Monster Notebook was genuinely one of the best measurement strategies we've come across to date. Rather than just adding a conversion tag through Google Tag Manager or sending data off to Google, the way you merged your own offline and online data, or built a lookup table matching in-store conversions to IP addresses and so on, really impressed us and got us excited. And because of that we ended up being a genuinely great fit, since everything we offer as added value, your infrastructure was already sitting there, fully ready to make use of it, so it clicked really well between us.

So, to make sure this conversation doesn't come across like a testimonial or a promotional ad, let me ask something else too. Yes, together we're clearly building a nice case study here, but generally speaking, what would you recommend people in the same ecosystem do with this kind of technology, Samet? Not everyone is as technical as you, and honestly I don't think they need to be, but you handle this so well that you can tie technical implementation and business logic together really tightly.

What do you think people need to do in 2026 to deal with these problems? Should they sit down and research how UTM parameters get blocked or not blocked on Safari? Or should they learn Google Tag Manager from top to bottom? What would you recommend? Honestly, what I'd recommend is working systematically. That's the foundation of everything. For example, you brought up Google Tag Manager as an example a moment ago. Here's the thing for me: the moment you open a Google Tag Manager account, everything needs to be organised and follow a certain structure.

Because I need to know exactly what I can manage, where and how, so that the integrations and processes I actually carry out can move really fast. For example, in the integration we did together, in the very first meeting I just asked, how do we do this integration? You told me, you add it here, this part is open. Meaning, do it however you want. I asked again, wait, it's open? Because I already had so much groundwork done internally around that openness. I only had to do one or two small bits of work on top of it.

Where did that come from? Honestly, it came from that underlying structure. Before learning Google Tag Manager, before learning any software, we first need to learn how to structure it properly. Because we're a generation that grew up literally drawing triangles, boxes and flowcharts on paper, so we genuinely need that structure with pen and paper first. Where are we actually going to get the data from, where are we going to send it, how are we going to process it? All of that needs to take shape in your head first. Only then can you work in a planned way based on it.

If tomorrow you run into some problem with Safari, with UTMs, as long as that's your only problem, we'll fix it. As long as your problem is about structure, about organisation, about the general system, that problem gets solved. Because there's no problem in digital, in technology, that can't be solved. Because the most basic thing users do, one way or another, is leave a trace everywhere. We see their movement digitally at every single point.

At the core of what we do with these digital traces is this: we first work out what kinds of digital traces might come in the future. We draw up a map based on that. We decide, we'll group and measure traces this way, this way. And we'll use them this way. To be able to do this, you first have to imagine it. Once you've imagined it, any piece of work can be done within that structure. I think you first need a base-level understanding of how the entire digital system works end to end, really the whole of the technology, from the back end to the front end, all the way through the API layer.

Because if you know that, if you know what that structure should look like, you can solve every problem. If tomorrow there's some problem with Safari, you solve it. As long as your overall framework is right. As long as there aren't critical problems in that overall framework. By the way, even on the simplest project, Berkay might think one way, I might think another. We can take different approaches. That doesn't mean mine is right and his is wrong, or his is right and mine is wrong. The key thing here is actually being able to bring those different rights together.

There are different perspectives at play there. Getting the right outcome out of those different perspectives is the most valuable thing for us. That's really good, honestly. Barış, what do you think? I mean, Samet's approach here is quite calm, and there's a calmness that comes from really mastering the technical regulations, but in the industry generally, not everyone is that calm, there's more of an I'm burning up, what are we going to do now, what's the fix going to be kind of perception, and that creates FOMO.

And when that FOMO builds up in people, there's this tendency to give up entirely. Instead of facing the problem, coming face to face with it and actually producing a solution, it's the opposite, facing the problem and going, man, how are we even supposed to deal with this, we've already got a mountain of work, let's just fall back on the old plan, the system's working right now, fine, let's not touch anything else. How do you think that affects the ecosystem right now?

By the way, I think your approach so far is actually the right one, because here's the thing, let's take the most recent development. What is it? Sites now getting traffic from ChatGPT and other AI tools. So what happened? A couple of days ago, or a few days ago, ChatGPT said, now you can make purchases directly through us. Stripe integration landed, you can buy things right from there. And suddenly everyone started obsessing over it. But that's the kind of development that's maybe only going to affect two, three per cent of your traffic for quite a while at first.

So while nobody's site currently has ChatGPT as its main traffic source, suddenly everyone started talking about pulling traffic from LLMs, doing LLM SEO properly, and a whole bunch of other topics like that. But you need to set that FOMO aside for a moment, how are we going to do this, should we do this, and think calmly instead. Is my setup right? Do I actually have a handle on everything I have? Did I build my system correctly? Is my data flowing correctly? You need to get that settled first, and only then think about these other things.

I think the most critical thing on that front is being able to think about the next steps. So yes, right now ChatGPT has started enabling purchases. That's one step. It's clear this isn't their final step. Where's this going next? What are the following steps going to be? Think about those, so that when they arrive you don't get hit with that oh my God, what do I do now, panic. I think approaching it that way and moving forward calmly always gets you to a better place in the end.

Now that I've said that, I'm curious about your side too. With these kinds of developments there's always that recurring question: will trading habits and behaviour patterns actually change? Where's it heading? I'd like to hear your thoughts on that too. What do you two think? By the way, a small example related to the previous topic. There are two types of people. One group integrates GA4 within half an hour of it entering our lives. The other group does the GA4 integration half an hour before Universal Analytics shuts down and just carries on with their lives.

I was in the first group. The moment it launched, I integrated it right away, come whatever trouble may come, let's see it. Whatever problem shows up, let's see it. I actually said something about this: Samet's the kind of person who waits until the egg's practically on the doorstep. Exactly. This is the digital version of that egg. Here's the thing though. One day, purchases are going to happen through AI. Actually, let me give a different example from what we talked about before we went live. One day, we might see AI serving as head coaches or football directors at football clubs.

Because what we call data has become so vast now. Every step a footballer takes, every step their opponents take, every strategy you could use to get past them. Three years from now, we might genuinely hear something like, club X's head coach is this AI module. Because this is fundamentally a data-driven business too. Even football is a data-driven business these days. So there's really no limit to where AI can take things.

It goes everywhere. Because wherever there's commerce, AI wants a position in it. Because, one way or another, the better positioned it is, the more it actually raises its own power, its own value. Has it made its way into e-commerce? Can you add to cart and buy directly from within it, from within the AI or anywhere else? That makes it even more valuable. Something happened recently when I went to the Netherlands, a real wave of nostalgia, I just searched for something on Google.

Seeing shopping ads show up in the search results actually got me a little emotional, I thought, we don't have this back home. It's not really a thing there. In that moment I was genuinely stunned, thinking, oh, this exists here, it felt strange, and then it hit me. It had just been so long since I'd come across something like it. I suddenly felt this strange feeling. But here's the thing, there are going to be so many commerce-related steps woven in that we're absolutely going to see this happen.

I honestly don't know exactly how we're going to see this play out. I don't know how the integrations will work. Tomorrow, for example, there's this thing called llms.txt, where you can describe yourself to AI directly. I don't know how well you can actually describe yourself through it. But here's what we did, we built a workflow around llms.txt. We hooked the sitemap into it. We connected all our website's data into it. We connected this, we connected that. And llms.txt now generates automatically. So it's built off our own data, our own structure, our dynamically stocked products and everything, and it just generates automatically.

I mean, this is already a file that's publicly accessible, you can go to any website and see this txt file. But how you manage it, how you use it, that's what matters. I know that one day, much like an XML feed, this txt file's structure might change. But we could be heading towards a future, with different technologies, where companies won't hesitate to feed AI with, you know, potentially far more sensitive data than this. I'll give an example from you two again.

Some people know you, some don't. All your company data is public. I don't need to dig up some hidden source to find out what you made last month, or over the past year. I can just go and see it from your own data. But that's not to say, this openness was a choice you made. But one day it might become mandatory for every company. We can't know the future, but we can roughly guess which direction it's heading. That's roughly it.

Because, honestly... oh, go ahead. That last point genuinely gave me goosebumps, by the way, what you just said. I basically just landed on that closing line and thought I'd wrap it up there. Couldn't quite finish it though. Didn't know how to land it. And whenever you say something like that, it's usually Berkay's cue to jump in. Let me pass it straight to Berkay. What are your thoughts on this, for example? That whole topic is great, actually, those txt files.

Genuinely, we adapt incredibly fast to whatever's changing and whenever it changes. I think that's humanity's best trait, adapting to things like this. But once that adaptation has to happen inside a white-collar, corporate structure, people genuinely start looking for a consultant. They can lose the motivation for new knowledge, new learning, new adaptation. We manage to find some of that motivation between Barış and me internally, whether it's making our company data openly available or the updates we make to the product, we genuinely want everything to be that transparent.

Sometimes that transparency can tip out of balance though. Being too transparent can come across to people as a bit of a slap in the face, so to speak. You know you shouldn't take it that far either. Yeah, it's a hard balance to strike, honestly. Not too authoritarian, not a black box, not closed off, but also not everything constantly on full display, that's roughly how we normally operate. Even when I was giving advice on the topics we've discussed, I was operating within that same kind of freedom, but of course some things do need limits.

Within those limits, you need to prioritise the learning curve. So, in short, when we're actually navigating our own adaptation, I think this is something worth keeping in mind. Once you lose that motivation, nothing is left. There's no guarantee here, for example. Say, Safari browsers might stop being used one day, or, let's not use an industry example, let's use one from somewhere else. Say, mobile phones might stop being used altogether. Everyone might switch to smartwatches instead.

Now, once smartwatches become common, you have to adapt your website to that. People might buy something straight from their watch, tapping through from there, or VR headsets are coming, other things are coming too. As people who are used to dealing with such primitive, such old technology, we might adapt to this really easily, or we might not adapt that quickly at all. Time will tell, but honestly, I think we'll manage to adapt even to that radical a shift.

Especially on both the technical and the business side. Barış, what do you think? I agree a hundred per cent, it's simply impossible for adaptation not to happen. I was actually going to say the same thing, one of the things we regularly ask ourselves during this adaptation process is exactly where our interaction with data is going to end up. Because inevitably, yes, we say AI and all that, but every kind of progress ends up getting built as another layer on top of the old system. You still pull data, it comes to you in table format, you look at that table, and that's how the data works.

You add a dimension, add a metric, and it breaks down accordingly. That's a very classic method. What we keep questioning is whether analysts, managers, directors, specialists will keep engaging with data this exact same way going forward. Will they keep communicating with data like this? Or could this whole system change entirely? And if it does, how does it change? We're really trying to work out how an analyst's role might shift. Because sure, it's great that an AI can hand you written insights, but how you actually communicate with the underlying data you feed it still runs on very traditional methods right now.

You need to accept that literally everything up to that point could change. The data you collect, there's this parameter called add to cart that's incredibly valuable to everyone's work right now. Maybe that won't exist anymore, maybe add to cart as a concept just disappears. If we prepare ourselves for these possibilities, I feel like the kind of adaptation both Berkay and Samet are talking about could reach a completely different level. Definitely. Actually, here's something. I don't even think SEO itself is properly understood most of the time, for example.

I'm not going to twist this into a different topic. What is SEO really, at its core? It's really just the best way of expressing yourself to search engines so you can reach users. You do that following the world's web standards and coding conventions. But we kept looking at it the wrong way, thinking we're doing this for Google. You're not doing it for Google. You're actually doing it for the user. You're doing it to express yourself better to the user. And the same fundamental thing applies on the AI side too.

So on the AI side, you're not going to try to explain yourself to the AI. You're actually going to try to express yourself really well to the user. If the AI positions you correctly as the answer to something, it'll surface you on its own. So what you actually need to do comes down to how well you express yourself. You'll express it well. You'll express it well digitally. You'll express it well on YouTube. You'll explain yourself really well.

You'll get your message across. And naturally, that produces some kind of outcome. Small, big, good, bad, but something, some outcome happens. Your expression gets across to the other side. Now, in terms of this whole communication method, we've had certain data communication methods for years. There were the classic databases we all know. Those changed. They evolved into different approaches. Microservices came along. Better, different structures like GraphQL came along. GraphQL, for example, is one of my favourite structures.

Because everything's automatic. There's no need to prepare documentation. Nothing like that. Where the data comes from, what format it arrives in, how it arrives, all of it is laid out clearly upfront. We've seen all this now. None of the earlier approaches were this open. None were this transparent. You used to have to read pages and pages of documentation just to understand what something even was. But now everything just generates automatically. This automation has entered our lives once, and there's no going back from it now. It can only get better from here.

It can develop further still. But I think being able to predict how that happens comes down to properly understanding the existing structure and the direction things are heading in. Our biggest problem is that we tend to get stuck fixated on our current resources. Oh, Vue.js came out. Oh, this happened with single-page applications. Fine, but where did it come from, what's happening with it today, and where is it heading? I think that's the part we actually need to focus on. Because if you can't keep up with that, if you get stuck somewhere on certain topics, you end up missing the next step too. If your technical foundation isn't suited for it, you miss the next train too. We touched on this a bit already. How are we going to express ourselves to AI? We don't know. The current situation right now is really limited. But we know one thing for sure. This structure is going to change a lot. It's going to develop a lot. We know that much. So say tomorrow an announcement drops. Say they announce, like with XML feeds, here's a new structure, here's this, here's that, and now you can describe yourself to AI this way. Out of every company on earth, how many could actually adapt within twenty-four hours? That's really the question we should be asking. That's the thing we need to be more flexible, faster about. Because we like to put things off. Let's just wait and see how it turns out. And to be fair, we do have a point there too. We've seen plenty of things come out and explode in popularity before. We've also seen plenty of things come out and just fail. So what happens? We don't want to jump straight onto the passing train either. We don't know where it's going to land. So we're stuck in this dilemma. New technology doesn't automatically mean a good thing. So we need to find the right balance. There was this Metaverse thing for a while. Everyone was trying to build sites in the Metaverse. Everyone thought people would buy through that. People buying virtual land and so on. It happened. And, by the way, people even bought virtual land in Istanbul, there was an Istanbul plot and everything. People bought those, but... honestly, jumping into it that way is a bit nonsensical as adaptation. People perceive it as adaptation, but... jumping onto that hype, that train, isn't actually adaptation, in my view. Genuinely having an informed opinion on the topic, developing yourself in it, that's different. They were saying SEO would die twenty years ago. It's supposedly still about to die now too. People go around asking AI about it and so on, but... Sure, maybe SEO as we knew it is dead now. Knowing how to make yourself visible on Google is what leads you straight into knowing how ChatGPT is going to track your website, how you need to add that txt code into that llms.txt file. So there's no point shifting your entire marketing strategy elsewhere just because someone declared SEO dead. At that rate we might as well grab a stack of flyers and go door to door. That would honestly be a more sensible strategy. We could approach it from that angle instead: why do people advertise on Google Ads, why do they do paid marketing in the first place. I think, because we leave adaptation to the very last minute here, we end up rushing headlong into it and it produces low-quality work. Even adaptation itself needs a certain quality to it, so that we can actually develop it, do the R&D, and produce projects that match or beat it. I think that's something we're a bit lacking in. When we look at Europe, people there aren't really more technical than us, honestly, or better at any particular thing than us. But what they do is exactly what I described, systematic. They know what came before, and they try to build things by blending that with what came after. We, on the other hand, tend to completely forget what came before, and rush into the new thing half-baked and messy. By the way, I think that flyer example I gave is actually really apt. If you know how to use a flyer well, if you know how to sell a product with a flyer, you will actually find it much easier going into Google Ads or Instagram ads. Because it's the same underlying system, just a different medium. One's a physical piece of paper, the other's a digital visual, but it's still a visual either way. At the end of the day, the same human is interacting with both of them. Like I said, wiping the slate clean and acting like the world just started over is completely unreasonable. We actually position this wrong quite often. Here's the thing, it's not like that at all. Say there's a product, X, doesn't matter what it is. And there's a user. Now, between them, when ChatGPT arrives, or some other AI, or new systems, new browsers, new search engines and so on, all that happens is a new channel gets added between the two. It doesn't erase the other ones. We tend to position this incorrectly. Because here's the thing. I'm a user. What can I do? I can search on a browser. I can search on YouTube. I can search on ChatGPT. In the end, if I have a need around some topic, I'll already signal that through my digital footprint somehow. I'm going to buy a computer. I'm going to buy a microphone. I'm going to buy something. I make that intent known. And once I've made it known, my behaviour steers me towards somewhere accordingly. If I search on Google, it steers me one way. If I search on YouTube, it steers me another way. If I search on social media, browse a few pages, it steers me somewhere. If I do it on ChatGPT, it steers me somewhere too. So there's actually no real change between people's needs and where they end up. But whenever a new channel appears between them, we tend to start badmouthing one of the older channels a bit. Or we get a pull towards whichever one happens to be trending and want to push that to the front. But at the end of the day that other channel doesn't just collapse like a bridge and disappear. So while we're building new things, we shouldn't be tearing down old ones. So, is SEO dead? No, it hasn't died, and it was never going to die. If you told me every search engine on earth was shutting down as of Monday, then sure, I'd say SEO's dead. But since we know that's never going to happen, as long as search engines exist, you'll still have that demand to rank higher there, so it's not dead. But what can happen is the method changes, the technology changes, the way you express yourself changes. Ten years ago there was no such thing as a single customer view in our vocabulary. Now every corner is full of these grand, elaborate setups for it. So these kinds of changes really just change the method. True. But in the end, like I said, it comes down to supply and demand. It's really just simple commerce at heart. And various paths within that commerce. Do you remember this? A few years back there was a period where, because apps were surging, some brands started saying, we've dropped our web investment, we're not putting money into web anymore. And I remember saying, don't do that, come on, that's not right. Sure, yes, apps are surging, brands are getting more revenue from them, but you can't just kill off web, at the end of the day there's still a genuinely serious chunk of users there. And some brands that did exactly that back then are paying the price for it now. Exactly like you said, just because something new shows up doesn't mean you toss aside every old medium entirely and act like it doesn't exist. If that logic actually held, physical retail wouldn't still exist today. If these new channels really held all the leadership, nobody would ever go to a physical store, everyone would just tap-tap-tap and buy from an app, and we're nowhere close to that. Physical retail is still at an incredible level. So, like you said, if people internalised this whole idea of channels being additive rather than replacing each other, I think everyone would be a lot happier through these kinds of transitions and would make much better decisions. Exactly. Actually, sorry, Berkay, you had something. Go ahead, go ahead. There's something here I can partly understand. Say the cost of keeping channel X running is a certain amount for me. So I decide not to invest that much into keeping it running, or I decide not to give it enough attention. For example, even if it exists, maybe I don't update it enough, don't put enough effort into training it. There's a software maintenance cost to that, an upkeep cost. I can understand that to some extent. That's its own kind of optimisation, a resource optimisation. I'm okay with that. But I'm against writing something off entirely. Take your physical store example, at its simplest. In the end, I can still go and physically search for something. I can go walk around a store. Because that's also a method. Just because I go there doesn't mean it's good to shut down the other channel entirely. Just because I buy online doesn't mean it's good to shut down the physical store either. So, at the very bottom of all this, we're all just people. We're all human, and we all have needs. Some needs, even something like a car, even if you're going to buy it online, you can't judge how comfortable it is without actually sitting in it. You can't say, this is it, without that. You can't make that decision without experiencing it. You have to be physically there for it. Some products are just like that. I can rave to you all I want about some restaurant in America, but you can't have an opinion on it until you've actually tasted the food, until you've experienced it yourself. You have to be there. That's a form of consumption too. So we really need to move carefully with how we position all this. But moving carefully doesn't mean being overprotective either, be careful, be careful, if the kid needs to fall, let them fall. Let them learn that way. Let them fall, fall again, and learn by stumbling and getting back up. Is that how you learned it too, Samet? You mentioned GraphQL, you mentioned VCS, things that honestly have no place at all in the digital marketing ecosystem, none whatsoever. But those skills clearly serve you elsewhere. Did you learn these on your own, how did you learn them? Maybe we went about this episode a bit backwards. Let's actually talk about the past a bit now. We'll edit it, trim it, cut it together properly. Let's open with this instead, put it right at the front. Hi everyone. That'll fix it, right? No, actually, here's the thing. Our generation is one where we got our hands on a computer right around when our childhood started. And I fell in love with this whole computer thing. If you asked me what my job actually is, honestly, I still can't quite say. If you asked Barış, I don't even really know what your job is either, and let me tell you why I don't know. Because I was a generation that basically grew up entangled with computers. And I decided, I'm going to sit at a computer, that's how my whole day is going to go, I'm going to turn this into a career, and I loved it. I started my career as a developer. And I kept progressing as a developer after that. I started at my first job. They said, we've got this project we're working on, you'll develop this, do it this way, do it that way. A week went by and they said, the project's cancelled. Sorry, what? I said. They said, project's cancelled, we're moving to SAP. They asked, do you know SAP? I said, no, I don't. And I should say, this was fourteen years ago, when I'd just started my career for the very first time. I said, I don't know it. They said, don't worry, you'll learn it. They said, you're going to manage the whole project. Sorry, what? I said. I mean, I said I don't know this thing, why are you handing me this responsibility, what's the point? I genuinely didn't know it. But we pulled off the whole project successfully. Why? What made it work? Honestly, at the bottom of it there was this: I knew software. I knew technology. I was curious. And over time, what happened was, while I was busy with SAP and things like that, I started getting really interested in the systems side. Servers, infrastructure. I'm not exaggerating, I must have broken Linux at least seventy times. I mean it, this must have happened to me at least seventy times. Whenever a new language came out, like when Go came out, I would be the first to dig into it. I would get curious. What's the syntax like, how does it work, how's it different from the others, what are its features, how powerful is it. The differences between every programming language, different syntax and all that. I do get annoyed at things like PHP's question marks and whatever else, sure, I do. But whatever language someone puts in front of me right now, I can work with it, edit it, no problem. Writing something from scratch is different from reading existing code and being able to make interventions in it, that's a very different thing. But actually existing within that code, within that language directly, that's a different thing again. I've genuinely seen how much benefit there is in having a software background. But I couldn't keep pushing forward purely in code, code, code. I couldn't do it, because I got really bored of it. The same screens over and over, Linux terminals, the same code in regular software, the same editors, a constant black screen. I got so bored of it. And once I got bored, I naturally gravitated towards the digital side of the work. Once I moved into the digital side, it felt more visual to me, more fun, more dynamic. So, as a result, where does that leave us today? I've got nearly twenty years of a software background behind me. I have a background with all the systems, the infrastructure and so on, all the different Linux package distributions, all of it, in some form. I've genuinely spent a lot of time in it. I've been involved in setting up, standing up, and configuring plenty of open-source systems. So what happened, essentially, is that I got here step by step, developing bit by bit, or changing bit by bit. So where does that leave things today? Yes, I look at it, I open up GTM, I look through it. There's stuff here, there's data here. I need to plan my progress this way, plan the future this way, get to this point. But at the same time, I also think, where do I get the data from, which method, how? What use are these server-side features to me? What kind of data actually lives inside what we call a client device, and how much of that can I make use of? So, because there's this underlying familiarity with the technology side, I genuinely enjoy that part of it too. There's this slightly negative label people use for someone who's interested in everything, you could say something's off there, right, what's really going on here. That kind of thing tends to get perceived negatively. Because people assume you can't really understand either one properly. But here's what I noticed. It's genuinely been a massive advantage for me. And going forward, I always said the same thing. When we needed to train up people on my team from scratch, teaching them what to do and how to move forward, I always said, I'm going to hire people with a software background and train them up myself. Because I said, if I take someone who already knows digital, I can't easily teach them this software, this technology, these systems, this infrastructure, all of it, I will struggle a lot more. But someone who already knows this side, I can teach digital to them far more easily. That is always been my approach. Whether I was working on the agency side or hiring and developing people for our own team, what I always taught was the same. I would say, go on, open YouTube, learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, get to a certain level with these, and then let's sit down and talk. Because you have to start from the absolute basics. Because this thing we call data exchange is a technology. Every integration you build around it is a technology. You need to know the fundamentals, the structure of how the whole system works, right from the start. So that muscle, so to speak, develops differently once you know these things. Your perspective develops differently. When I mentioned GraphQL a moment ago, that's actually where this topic came from. I have to keep track of all this. Even down to the difference between a regular SQL Server and something like MongoDB, the query speeds between one database and another, right down to how many milliseconds a response takes to come back, I have to know these things. Why? Because if you're fundamentally talking about conversion optimisation, everything falls under that. Does your website's load speed affect your SEO results? Yes, it does. Does responding to the user quickly affect your performance here? Does it matter? At the end of the day, if your website or app was converting two people out of every hundred, can you now manage to convert four out of every hundred instead, because of all this? Yes, you can. That's really where success lies. Success is getting back what you put into the work, the effort you invested there. That's exactly why I say this. On our side, yes, I keep improving across all kinds of different technologies, all over the place. That's my job. I genuinely love it. I love engaging with it. I love researching. Normally, if you told me to sit down and read a book, I wouldn't. But I'll happily read a thousand pages of documentation. You know what I mean? There's a state you get into there. I genuinely enjoy it. We read through pages and pages of it. And honestly, that's largely how we came into this industry ourselves. Berkay knows this side of it well too. We've read some genuinely terrible documentation too, where they couldn't even properly explain what something was, couldn't articulate it at all. And we learned a lot of things purely by trial and error. Because we simply didn't know. We learned by doing. And honestly, learning itself is easy once you get there. I always say this: first you have to learn how to learn. You have to learn how you personally learn. You have to learn how to solve a problem. Everything else follows from that. Want to learn Go? Just go learn it, that part's easy. But you need to learn those fundamentals first. We need to be a bit more open to developing, more open to growth. We need to genuinely enjoy researching. It's partly a matter of temperament. You need to make it a habit. For someone who hasn't made it a habit, all of this feels like an unbearable weight. That's just how it is. And fundamentally, we need to keep doing exactly that, keep following these developments, keep researching them, keep growing. Because with every passing day, people's demands change, their needs change. You need to adapt to that. Honestly, that was a legendary answer. I think it genuinely answered the question. If I had to add a footnote to everything you just said, it really comes down to being curious. Being curious about learning things, about researching. Once you have that, everything else follows. Because once you have that, you're already learning how to learn, since you're essentially spending your whole life trying to learn something anyway. And at some point you can say, this is how I learn best, this turned out to be my way of learning. So there's not much more to add on top of that, honestly. Well said. Let me toss out a couple of questions. Honestly, I really respect this. And feel free to pass it my way after, once I've said my piece of admiration. We tried to steer this towards more everyday territory but ended up going pretty deep into the technical side, but honestly, one thing that really caught my attention here, I think we could even use it as this video's title. Something like, why does a digital marketer need to be technical, or why they need to look at things with a developer's mindset. Here's the analogy I would draw. This is exactly the example you gave: you're a race car driver, but if you don't know how the car actually works, you at least need to know where the gearbox is, that kind of thing. When you pop the hood, where's the engine, where's the gearbox, where's whatever else. By the way, those are literally the only two I know, engine and gearbox, that's about the extent of my car knowledge, I was just trying to think of a metaphor there. Being a driver is one thing, and reading about how to be a driver in a book is a completely different thing. You can do both, sure, but genuinely combining a mechanic's mindset with that mathematical instinct while you're actually in the driver's seat, knowing exactly which millisecond you need to steer right, exactly where you need to hit the brakes before, blending that analytical mathematical thinking with the technical knowledge, I think that's the most valuable thing here. Honestly, that's genuinely my own perspective on this too. I even have a slightly more generalised philosophy about it. It's this: whatever job we do, we don't necessarily have to become developers. Whatever job we do, we're using a computer. So whether it's that computer, I would rather we know code without necessarily having to write code ourselves. Knowing how that computer actually works feels almost magical to me. Because at the end of the day, everyone's using a mouse. You could use that mouse to learn Adobe Illustrator, or to learn any other program. At the end of the day you're clicking a mouse and pressing keys on a keyboard. I've actually boosted my own learning curve this way, by reducing things down to that basic level and generalising from there, let's put it that way. Then let me hand it over to you, Samet. That's a genuinely admirable perspective, honestly. Congratulations on that. I'm about to hand it to you too, but with a question attached. Here's the thing. We've talked so much here. We talked about the past. We talked about the present. We're talking about the future. Now, I'm sure of one thing: you two have work lined up ahead of you. We're going to do this, then we're going to do that. We've got this kind of plan for 2026, this kind of plan for 2027. But you also know full well that in 2026 or 2027, something could come crashing into our lives out of nowhere and change a whole lot of things. Kind of like when ChatGPT first burst onto the scene, even though not everything about it was great at the time, I'm talking about right when it first launched. The moment it arrived, wherever it landed, everyone went, what on earth is happening. In an industry where something can suddenly land right in front of you out of nowhere like that, what's it actually like developing a project, making forward-looking projections for a project, or going through a process where you're constantly saying, this might happen a year from now, we need to prepare for it this way, that way? Because it's genuinely painful, really painful, you're trying to improve on what you already have, and suddenly someone shows up and drops something in your lap, saying, hey, here's this new thing. What's it actually like being in the middle of that, because you're running a company, you have to have plans, and right in the middle of those plans some unknown factor X shows up and throws a wrench into everything. Let me pass this to Barış actually. When it comes to making decisions together, we genuinely try not to make overly rigid, grand strategic decisions. We try to avoid that kind of stiff, top-down decision-making. And that's actually what gives us the flexibility, because, like I said, literally anything can happen, and once you're running a company, the idea that anything could happen at any moment stops feeling far-fetched to you, it genuinely stops sounding absurd, because genuinely, anything really can happen. So you can handle every doomsday scenario, everything you need to do, up to a point, you can prepare for a certain amount of it, but of course there'll always be things that fall outside any plan. That's why we've built this adaptation process into ourselves internally, we've developed the muscle, so to speak, for how to deal with it whenever someone drops something unexpected into our lap. We've actually gotten to a point where we expect it. Let me give you an example. Say you're working and you have no meetings, a lovely calm day, and you actually find yourself surprised by that, thinking, huh, how strange, nothing happened, the server didn't crash, nothing happened, something's supposed to happen by now, or, no news dropped on LinkedIn. Like, hey folks, Google's gone down, and you wake up in the morning and see Google's actually down. Nobody wants to start their day like that, nobody wants that, but you adapt so fast that, say, at nine in the morning Google's service goes down. Everyone, nobody can log into Gmail, and so on, and then you immediately start drafting a post about it, your brain just goes there automatically, turning the crisis into an opportunity: look, Google's servers went down, you can't get into Gmail, you can't get into Google Tag Manager either, look, this is exactly why you need first-party data, your mind, that muscle, immediately jumps to tying it back to that. Now, that could actually be a bad thing too, by the way, always turning every crisis into an opportunity, but a crisis really can also evolve into something meaningful, it doesn't necessarily have to turn into some kind of sales asset. So I think this really does come down to that same muscle, just like adapting to new software frameworks whenever you're tracking developments in that world. Barış, what do you think here? I think that muscle is genuinely a great thing to have. Honestly, here's how I see it: I think living in Turkey, and having built our career here, is actually an advantage on this front, because there's already so much chaos here anyway, you wake up one day and, well, for example, having lived through Covid, you wake up one day and everywhere's shut down and all the traffic has suddenly flooded into digital. You wake up one day and there's been a coup. You wake up one day and the exchange rate's shot through the roof, prices are shifting overnight. You go through so many crises that minor ones stop really affecting you as much, and we've been through natural disasters too, on top of everything. That said, what we're actually trying to do is, well, we're still a very young company, so we don't really have that structure of carving annual goals in stone and handing them down to the team, because there's only about ten of us inside anyway. The second thing we try to do is set a vision, define the point we're trying to reach, but we're also fully aware we're never going to get there in a straight line. We'll head towards that point, but one day some wind will blow through and knock us forty-five degrees off course to the right. At that point we need to say, okay, we're not going down this path anymore, we need to start heading down this other one that's forty-five degrees to the right instead. So really, as long as we're getting one step closer to that vision every single day, we're in a place where we believe we're on the right path. Some days that means improving the product, some days it means upgrading the servers behind the scenes, some days it means putting out a piece of documentation. But our goal is clear, our goal is genuinely to build a system that lets people interact with their digital marketing data, or with marketing measurement in general, more comfortably, more easily, and in a different, better way, one they can actually manage. And we're very aware here that two years from now the world will look completely different, and you can prepare for that all you want, but the most fundamental thing you can actually do is develop that adaptability, that agility muscle, so that no matter what comes your way, you can pick it up, wrap it up, and keep moving. We try to build that flexibility into both the team and ourselves, keep those muscles warm, so to speak. Because, as you know, as the team grows, as the customer base grows, every added layer makes it harder for you to move quickly. Back when it was just Berkay and me, two of us, so much would change in our world within just two days, we would be changing so much, it genuinely felt like flying. But sure, the downside is you become dependent on everything else too. You hire more people, your customer count grows. Shipping an update was easy when you had five customers, it's not so easy anymore with sixty. You need to think about everyone. Is this update I'm about to ship going to affect Samet's life? Is it going to affect brand X's life? You need to think that through. So, alongside that growing load, how do we still hold onto that flexibility? We genuinely think about this constantly. Here's the thing, in business, everyone depends on everyone else. Everyone needs to work together, needs to build things together. Because no matter how much you understand across the board, more than anything, you need time, and you need the capacity to actually manage all of it. You know, we've actually talked about this on the phone too, that at certain points you need to position yourself a bit differently. Because here's the thing. By the nature of the business, of trading, you have customers in front of you. First, you need to actually engage with them so they're happy with the service they're getting from you. You need to solve all their problems, genuinely care about them. But at the same time, for purely commercial reasons, you also need to grow. So on one hand, you need to make sales to grow. And to make sales, you need internal movement, processes progressing, and so on. You need to stay in a dynamic state. Like you said, every new customer that comes in ends up, whether you like it or not, making you a bit more rigid. So you lose some of that flexibility, and eventually you end up at a point where you're saying, I need to make money, I need to do business, and I also need to keep everyone here happy. You can pull that off. You can build a system that lets you do it. There are companies out there with thousands, millions of customers, and their happiness levels genuinely sit above ninety-five per cent, ninety-nine per cent even. And then there are other companies that just focus purely on the money they're making, and end up dying by whatever they were solely focused on. And there's something I know very well, both about myself and about you two. Let the other side be happy first. Doesn't matter who they are. Whether it's a customer, whether you're talking to Berkay, or Berkay's talking to you, there's always this same underlying thing: don't hurt them, don't upset them, make sure they feel good about it. Doesn't matter if it's a customer or anyone else. And when you approach things this way, as the team grows you actually get far more out of it. The payoff for this ends up being much bigger. In the end, it's a short life. We're all just working here, making money, and so on. There's no need for anyone to hurt anyone, upset anyone, or trample over anyone to do that. If you approach it with that mentality, you can actually get more out of a ten-person team than a forty- or fifty-person team gets without it. You can get that happiness out of it. And every single person's happiness on the team reflects onto your customers too. I'm not saying this specifically about you two, just because we're sitting here talking to each other. It could be about company X, doesn't matter who. Every bit of internal peace reflects outward. Every bit of internal unrest reflects outward too. That's why human relationships matter so much. As much as we keep talking about technology, where is technology heading, where is technology heading, there's always a human behind it. We should never lose sight of where people are heading too, where people's emotions are shifting. Even if the world's biggest AI shows up tomorrow, in the end, the people who'll integrate it, develop it, get their hands dirty with it, the people building that technology, are still human. So first and foremost we need to give people the value they deserve. We need to create that peaceful environment so we can actually move forward with the technology. As I mentioned before, a pandemic happens, this happens, that happens. Sometimes you see these captions floating around online, like they've picked Turkey up from here and said, that's it, enough, and moved it somewhere else. We see those captions a lot, honestly. We really are in such a chaotic part of the world. Everything happens so fast here. It's actually developed us a lot. For example, if a coup happened somewhere in Germany today, people there genuinely wouldn't know what to do. But don't get me wrong, they'd probably reschedule their meetings and figure it out somehow, who knows how. Man, it's like, where were you on the fifteenth of July, that kind of thing, or where were you on the second of October 2025. By the way, something just popped up again, let me clear this up. Before we went live, Barış and I were talking about a lion. This lion has nothing to do with Galatasaray, by the way. It's a different kind of lion. Which team are you? I support Meiderich. Oh, nice. I was half expecting you to say Werder Bremen or something. No, no, no, this lion's about the star sign Leo, my wife's zodiac sign, that's what I meant, nothing to do with football lions. By the way, yesterday's Galatasaray win was that match against Liverpool. Congratulations to Galatasaray, even though this isn't really about Galatasaray. Actually, I don't even know, I'm keeping a poker face here. I know you way too well, man. Football's my thing. Maybe you don't remember me from back then, but I've got nothing after 2000. Let me name off the 2000 Galatasaray squad for you: Taffarel, Filipescu, Popescu, Arif Erdem, Hasan Şaş. And then everything just stopped there for me, man. Anyway, honestly, well said, both of you, especially. Samet, your closing point was really, really good and true. We talk a lot about technology and so on, but we shouldn't forget the essence of it either. I think that's actually one of the most critical, valuable points in all this. There's still a lot more to talk about, but we've gone past an hour now, so this is probably a good point to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us. Honestly, thank you so much, Samet, again. Let's absolutely set up a second one. Done. Exactly. Alright, take good care of yourselves. See you. See you around. See you around. Bye. Thanks, everyone.