I spent two days at Istanbul Ignited by Slush'D 2026 with my team. We showed people SEOmator, I listened to Trendyol's CEO on agentic commerce, and a former customer told me something about AI that I'm still thinking about.
Last year I wrote up my notes from the audience, and last month I was behind a microphone for their Startup Talks. On October 13 and 14 I went back to Istanbul Ignited by Slush'D for both days, this time with two of my teammates: Oğuzhan Ulukaya, one of our developers, and Mert Özeren from customer success.
Menemen in Taksim before day one, then badges on at the sign with Oğuzhan and Mert.
Trendyol and agentic commerce
The most valuable talk for me was by Trendyol Group CEO Erdem İnan. He explained the ecosystem Trendyol has built for about 250,000 merchants, then moved on to agentic commerce: AI agents that shop on the customer's behalf. In his view there's still a lot of room to build there.
He didn't oversell it, though, and I liked that. He doesn't expect agents to handle every purchase from start to finish. In fashion and lifestyle people want to browse and compare, so he thinks agents will spread first in categories where the shopper already knows what they want.
Two more from day two: Google's Mehmet Keteloğlu and the Ministry of Industry and Technology's Sadullah Uzun on making AI helpful for everyone, and Kübra Gündoğan (Loom Games) and Akın Babayiğit (Tripledot Studios) with Enis Hulli (E2VC) on the billion-dollar playbook for games.
Showing people SEOmator
Slush'D inspired me a lot, because so much of the tech ecosystem is there. It was also a good place to introduce our new product, SEOmator. People gave us positive feedback, and some good suggestions for improving it.
I talked a lot with my friend Batuhan Özyön, founder of Scrape.do, which runs the scraping behind SEOmator. Last time we caught up it was over pizza in London. I also had a good talk with Bugrahan Saka from the Scrape.do team.
The customer who found me by my badge
I also had a pleasant surprise. Mohammad Khalaf, founder of HoneyBeam, came up to me after he saw Popupsmart on my name tag. He used to be one of our customers.
For a moment I felt proud. Then I learned he doesn't use Popupsmart anymore. He moved to a competitor, Alia Popups.
So I asked him what, in his view, makes them different.
His answer: they use AI to generate the popups automatically on Shopify, tailored to the whole customer journey.
Looking back
Those two conversations ended up saying the same thing to me. Erdem İnan talked about AI agents shopping for customers, and Mohammad told me about an AI doing the setup for a merchant. In both cases the AI does work that a person used to do.
Last month I wrote that features got cheap to build but not any cheaper for the person who has to learn them. Alia skips that part, because the AI builds the popup for you. Hearing it from someone who used to pay us wasn't fun. It was useful, though, and it's the same direction we're taking with SEOmator.
