Kemal and I have gone under many times. The first was Patile. But none of them hurt like 2024.
\n2024 started well, and we had big goals. Then one of our biggest clients went bust and another stopped paying. In March, Kemal and I sat in a börek shop and I ran the numbers in Excel: where the salaries would go, where the debt stood, how many more months of payroll we could cover. A few more months like that and we would not have been able to pay anyone.
\nFirst we cut the team in half. A few months later we let everyone go except one person, and at the end of the year the last one too. We went from 11 people to 2. By December our debt was the price of two houses.
\nWe had 10-11 projects, and every one of them carried heavy technical debt. When a team falls apart, nobody cares about technical debt. The work didn’t shrink, there was just no one to do it. From the end of 2024 to the end of 2025 there were very few days we worked less than 12 hours.
\nIn December 2024 we pitched an AI project to a district municipality in Istanbul. We had built an AI avatar that greeted applicants in the hiring process, took their details and filled in their CV. We had two or three meetings and the project stalled. Maybe we didn’t explain it well, maybe it was far ahead of its time.
\nOn the way back we are in Kemal’s white Egea, he is driving, I am in the passenger seat. We are completely drained, but also excited about where the technology has got to. As if we were right in the middle of something new.
\nWhen a piece of information lands on me, my brain doesn’t stop until it settles. The next morning I wrote to Kemal asking if we should rebrand Etrexio. I was thinking of defining every task in a software agency and running it through AI. Then a name came: Digi Sapiens. Digi Sapiens, next to Homo sapiens. I asked my wife Sevin, and she said “digital humans.”
\nKemal said “if nothing else, we can sell the domain, let’s buy it.” .ai domains were sold for at least two years, 7,000 lira. The same day we had talked about the gym: Kemal said “we never go, it’s a waste,” I said “I can’t pay in cash.” The company was in the red, we were in the red. We bought digisapiens.ai anyway. It is the most I have ever paid for a domain.
\nRiding that excitement, I opened all the social media accounts and Google Workspace the same day and sent the first email.
\n15-20 days later Kemal filmed me: I am staring at the camera without moving. We were trying to lip sync my idle footage to teach it how to stand still when it isn’t talking. Behind it, GPT’s API, voice conversion, mouth sync. These were hard things in 2024. It felt like we were creating a new coworker, a new species.
\nThe debt had two sides: technical debt and financial debt, piled on top of each other. When you are about to get warning letters from the banks, looking at Digisapiens would have been like combing your hair while the house burns. We didn’t even order food in, we ate toasties at the office.
\nIn October 2025 I sent Kemal the list of Google Workspace accounts to shut down. Digisapiens was on it. We couldn’t spare 100 lira a month, so we closed it.
\nIn 6-8 months we finished most of the projects and collected the payments. By the end of 2025 we got out without going under. On paper we never went under, but in reality we sank and came back up.
\nIn 2026 Kemal focused on Digisapiens and took on most of the development. Today there are digital employees you give a name and a job description, who run the process with you and talk to each other. I now have Digi do my own content analysis. Even though I know how it works, it still feels strange to me, and a little emotional.
\nA year ago I pulled the plug on a project because 100 lira felt like too much. Today it is in closed beta, looking for its first 100 users.
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