Adil GunaslanHello, my name is Adil Gunaslan. I was born on October 24th, 1971 in 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. At this point you might expect a different photo to go with such a name. I hear that alot, let me explain...
My dad is from Istanbul, Turkey and belongs to the first generation of turkish migrant workers in the Netherlands. My mom is Dutch but born during WWII in Magelang, Indonesia. For one thing that meant a lot of stories, cultural influences and delicious food. It also meant hard work for low wages, so they could provide my older sister and me with an education and opportunities they never had. They taught us to make something of your life, help other people, have an open mind and believe in your dreams.
My dream, like many youngsters in Europe, was to become a legendary soccer striker like Cruijf, Maradona or Van Basten. If you're into soccer you'll know this dream did not come true :-) I did play semi-professional until the age of 17, but it would not be my cause in life.
Commodore C64I got my first computer on my 13th birthday in 1984. It was a Commodore C64 and I learned to program the games from popular computer magazines. Following were an Atari and Intel i386 in the late 80s.
After finishing high school in 1990, I started studying Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. This involves research and design of manufacturing products like cars, bridges and airplanes. I learned so much at this place. From Fundamental Science to Material Mechanics to Energy Technology to Technical Drawing to Software Engineering to Business Management to operating Computer Aided Design, welding machines and windtunnels. But particularly I learned to absorb vast amounts of information, bring it back to the essentials and explain that to others.
I specialized in Technical Business Management and Systems Engineering focusing on process optimization and automation. During my thesis I researched Business Process Reengineering and Workflow Management methods and developed software to control factory plant robots in real-time. I graduated in 1996. Hooray!
The internet had just become publicly accessible, so around this time I also started designing and building my first HTML websites. Besides all this technology and studying, I have always had an active social life, worked in a bar in Den Bosch, played guitar in a hiphop/metal band and created electronic music with friends winning a drum&bass contest and releasing the baby john album with my friend Alecto.
Fresh out of University in 1996 meant jobs in IT were everywhere. After studying almost your entire twenty-something life it was time to start working and earning my own money. After working on an internet project for a museum in Den Bosch, I got my first real job at Logica, which was a very good experience at a large company that works for even larger clients. Logica wanted the right person for the right job, so they let me decide where I wanted my career to go. I preferred to pursue product innovation strategy and project management instead of i.e. software programming.
I started working in Logica's Mobile Telecom division as junior Project Manager for KPN in Utrecht. This was a small team of 15 people working on KPN's number portability service in the Netherlands. This is a fancy name for keeping your phone number when moving to another provider. During this project, I studied the PRINCE2 Project Management method and created a Project Plan and Quality Plan and saw how large IT operations take place in practice. After a smooth rollout, my job was finished.
Next, I was assigned Quality Manager for Telfort in Amsterdam. This was a large team consisting of over 100 people working on call-center software for Telfort operations in the Netherlands. This time my responsibility was to make sure that software development took place according to Logica's Quality Guidelines and ITIL. In this job, I worked together with developers and project managers, reported to management and was spokesperson for quality related subjects at client meetings with Telfort.
After working succesfully at Logica for two years, my passion for the internet grew further and I started to feel the entrepeneur inside. I had a couple of startup ideas and it was not expensive to get started. I just needed time to build innovative solutions that businesses need. With not a lot of money nor an expensive lifestyle, I just had to secure a minimal income to get started.
I discussed a part-time job with Logica, but that was a no go and they were also not involved in internet technology at the time. The Netherlands is packed with traffic jams and I knew I could win 3 hours per day if I found a job nearby where I lived. That would give me at least 15 hours extra per week for product development. So searching for a job nearby was exactly what I did...
I found a job at an IT company in Den Bosch that wanted to start a business unit delivering B2B internet services. They hired three people including myself to create new business. We passionately started working for two clients, but were confronted with the first setback soon: ‘there are no resources for sales efforts’. We started consulting and developing websites for the available clients knowing this issue would return. It actually did not as the company more or less went bankrupt.
Entrepeneurship?I was single, had a couple of thousand in the bank, cheap rent and not much to loose. I decided to take the plunge, went to the Chamber of Commerce and founded Numotion Internet Solutions. Focusing on innovation, I forgot to think about accountants and taxes at first, but eventually this was all arranged and as of January 1st, 2000 I am officially a tax-paying entrepeneur with zero employees.
I signed my first client soon after that. They needed a website for 2000 registered users, which they could easily manage themselves. I designed and developed a custom Content Management System for them.
Content Management was not all the rage yet, but the need for simple website management tools was growing. I decided to develop a reusable Content Management System, called Nucontroller CMS (later Numotion WebManager).
This modular CMS system proved valuable for many clients and partners/resellers that did not have professional CMS software. Numotion provided consulting, project management, webdevelopment, search engine optimization and support services and worked with partners and freelancers to provide full-service internet solutions.
The CMS system has been used by many organisations big and small like GfK, Océ, Spar, the Dutch Association for Radiology and some government departments. As a result Numotion was awarded among the top 20 most innovative companies in the Netherlands in 2003. It never became a million dollar business, but Numotion has been profitable every year. I worked way to many hours per week, learned and shared a lot, met some great people and had a lot of fun!
Innovation and StartupsThis type of business needs to scale to remain competitive and to do this you need more resources. Besides that, the rise of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), which is a good thing in my opinion, made it increasingly difficult to keep product features up-to-date and find new and recurring business.
Around 2006, I knew that a new crossroad was ahead. Either grow operations and hire staff or remain independent and keep innovating. This was a no-brainer because my passion mainly evolves around product innovation and marketing strategy and less around managing operations. I decided to remain independent without employees. Inspired by the innovators of the industry (and my girlfriend Pauline), I set my mind to exploring new ideas and building new products, while actively supporting existing clients and partners.
Learning from my previous venture, I wanted to launch things that would interest me personally and generate recurring, passive income from minimal labour. This way I could launch multiple different ideas at the same time, while not repeating the same trick, like before. Sounds smart huh?
I launched a couple of niche websites to generate income from Google Adsense advertising and soon found out that ‘if you just build it, people will not come’. I started learning Internet Marketing to get higher rankings in search engines and became pretty good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Keyword Research and Web Analytics thanks to experts like Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall, Avinash Kaushik and Brian Clifton. I started generating some passive, recurring income with content that did not specifically interest me but it worked.
With Google's algorithm improving and competition growing, it became increasingly difficult to rank websites that don't have a lot of unique content and backlinks. Next stop, built platforms with user-generated content that is unique and valuable so people will link to it or share it via social media like Facebook and Twitter. This time with platforms I am really passionate about. I am now convinced people don't just buy into a product. They buy into what creators of a products believe.
I co-founded Amuseerje.nl in 2007, which is a great platform for local events in the Netherlands. Everything from conferences and concerts to small markets can be found here. My co-founder is from the publishing industry creating magazines for cultural events. His responsibility is sales and content marketing. I developed our business model and a web/mobile publishing platform supported by advertising, ticketing and e-commerce transactions. We generate recurring revenue from publisher subscriptions and advertising. We have been in talks to sell the business, but as we speak Amuseerje.nl is an independent entity run entirely by local content providers.
At the same time, I co-founded homeofthelegends.nl with my friend and collegue internet expert Wytze Lap. Home of the Legends was officially the first social sports network in the Netherlands, where sports fans can create great social hubs for their team/club. Our business model is advertising and affiliate marketing. We have 10.000 registered users and 100k visitors per month. Currently we work on exciting things like mobile, live scores, LBS, augmented reality and going global.
Both platforms are a lot of fun and have a continuous flow of user-generated content and social interaction. Let's see how this works out...
SkillsNowadays I also share my knowledge and experience with companies by providing interim internet strategy and product development consulting and leading development teams. I also continue working on the existing platforms and think I have some more startups in me with ideas evolving around mobile, location based services and the social graph in both the commercial and public sector.
On the Business Strategy side, I continue to share business opportunities and research trends and internet business models. It's Lean Startups and mainly Scrum in management. On the Internet Marketing side I continue exploring SEO, Web Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Local Internet Marketing, Content Marketing and to lesser extent PPC Advertising. In Webdevelopment it's all about Wireframing, HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, Mobile Frameworks, PHP, Ruby On Rails, Python, iPhone, Android, Node, SQL/NoSQL, Hadoop and a lot of open APIs.
So what is my cause in life?
I have this curiosity of wanting to know how things work which goes beyond internet business and innovation (I love cooking, history, philosophy, nature, travel and politics too...). I can't help it. Learning, sharing knowledge, helping others and developing ideas make me tick. It is what I'm good at and one of the main reasons i am an entrepeneur. I hope I can someday use this to do meaningful things for society.
I hope my story inspires you to spend your precious time doing things you love most! Good luck to you and feel free to contact me if you want to have a chat.
