Shardul Pandey interviews only those who own their domain in webspace for doing business on Internet so if you too want to get interviewed please examine your domain before to e-mail all results to shardulpandey@sangkrit.org.
[quote style=”1″]When with some of your unique idea about enhancing utility of Internet you create a website on your domain and stay focused on it, I become more than willing for interviewing you as a freedom fighter whether you think so or not but you certainly become one for establishing Internet world order.
That’s why I appeal you to bring most of things at your domain under GPL as it is the very nature of Internet that must be left open, free, fluid and live for the rest of humanity
–Shardul Pandey[/quote]
I welcome you Aykut at SANGKRIT.net, please tell our netizens about yourself?
I am Aykut Pehlivanoglu, 29 years old, Co-Founder and CEO at PB Bilisim. PB Bilisim is a Turkish software company founded in 2007. I live in Ankara, capital of Turkey. I graduated from Middle East Technical University as a chemical engineer in 2005. In 2005, web design was not my thing as you can guess from my department :) But then Ercan, my partner (from same school, same class) came to me with some web project ideas. We started to work on these little projects as fun. After two years, we decided to found a software company to convert our hobby to a profession. Then we established this business. With love, hardwork and passion, we created different ideas, projects and products, and we still keep our emotions alive for creating more and more. Readers can check our company website to see all the projects in detail. ( www.pbbilisim.com )
How exactly your idea sparked?
I like to read biographies and often I see that most of the people who created a popular piece of art say the same thing: “I was creating different songs for my album. Song A was our potential hit song, we worked on it so hard. Before our album release, we need to put 12 songs but we have 11 at stock. We put this 12th song with quick work without expecting anything from it. Just for fun. But now all the world knows this 12th song but none remembers this song A.”
It is very funny to experience the same thing :) Worth Of Web was a project which I coded the first version in a weekend with my black coffee near and jazz at my headphones in January, 2011. I was using some similar website value calculators myself but I was not satisfied with them. I said to myself I can do better. But after all it was just for fun, I completed this first version, found this name “Worth Of Web”, and showed to Ercan “hey partner, look what I did this weekend” :) We added this project to our portfolio and that was it for us. However, this has become our 12th song on our album, and now it is getting popular day by day in a organic way :)
Do you work alone or you got people associated for working together?
There are 2 people in our core team, Ercan and me. For worthofweb.com main site, we have worked with different graphic designers and programmers. Now, for its blog, we have a chief editor and 8-10 writers. For other projects we also have different teams.
What philosophy drives you people for doing this?
As I told, Worth Of Web was a project started with pure fun purposes. There were no project schemes, business plans, etc. We continue to feel the same philosophy although it turned to a serious job. We would like to help website owners by giving value estimations for their websites and competitors’ sites, and we would like to help improving our users’ websites by providing SEO, internet marketing and web development tips on our channels.
What makes your endeavors unique on Internet?
We keep our functions simple and user-friendly. We don’t target “only” savvy developers. We also want to help newcomers. This is valid for both our calculators and our blog. For example, recently we changed our interfaces accordingly, we started to give tips on our blog for every kind of web developer, webmaster or blog owner.
Any future plans for WorthofWeb.Com? Are you working on some other projects also ?
We always work on our calculator algorithms to give a better estimate. Our new interface became more user-friendly. We got so many messages in 2 years that say “dear worth of web team, what can I do to improve mywebsite/blog, please help me”. We were sharing links to different sources, but 3-4 months ago we decided to open our blog to help web society. So we created a writers team for this purpose. Now we publish helpful articles daily on our blog
(http://www.worthofweb.com/blog/ ) In addition, in our blog we have case study videos where founders of popular web projects tell their stories. We think these will be very helpful to understand real problems these big projects confronted while they were little.
Other than Worth Of Web, we have online and mobile game projects under Gametator brand ( www.gametator.com ), we have a web app called Suggest Me Movie, a movie recommendation engine ( www.suggestmemovie.com) and other projects that you can find at our company website.
What is your ultimate message for netizens?
I think we are at the very start of Internet era. We have discovered just a new continent, land piece. For now, I feel we don’t use it efficiently enough. Like it happened in any area which humans involved, there are lots of “black hat” people around and they abuse this hunger for knowledge. I can say to netizens that we all need to be very careful what we read, what we watch, what we listen, and we need to choose the sources wisely for our Internet education.
I also want to thank you for this interview, keep your high quality work :)