Everyone's first website is terrible. Mine was no exception.
In early 2020, I pushed a repository called cizgi-dizi, a fan site for a Turkish cartoon. It was basic HTML, some CSS that I thought was clever, and absolutely zero JavaScript. The design was questionable. The code was messier. But when I opened that index.html in Chrome and saw something I had built rendered on screen, something clicked.
I did not start coding because I had a business plan. I started because I was curious. That first website was pure experimentation: tables for layout (yes, tables), inline styles everywhere, colours that had no business being next to each other. But it taught me the most fundamental lesson of software development. You learn by building, not by reading.
Within weeks, I was rebuilding it. Then rebuilding it again. Each iteration was slightly less terrible. I discovered CSS Grid, then Flexbox. I learned that float: left was not, in fact, the only way to position things side by side.
The jump from "I can build websites" to "I can build products" happened faster than I expected. Once you realise that code can solve problems, real problems that real people have, you cannot unsee it. Every frustration became a potential project. Every manual process became an automation opportunity.
I started building tools for Discord communities because that was where I spent my time. Server moderation was painful. Invite tracking was nonexistent. Spam was rampant. These were not abstract problems from a textbook. They were problems I experienced daily.
My first serious project was a moderation bot for Discord. Basic commands: ban, kick, mute, warn. Nothing revolutionary. But it worked, and server admins needed it. Word spread. Within months, there were users I had never met relying on software running in my bedroom.
That was when I understood product-market fit, not as a concept from a startup book, but as a lived experience. When people you do not know start depending on your software without you asking them to, you have found something.
By the time I founded HMD Corporation, I had shipped enough projects to know two things.
I could build things that scaled. The early projects were handling real traffic. I was not guessing about architecture anymore. I was making informed decisions based on real operational experience.
Building alone has limits. The best software comes from collaboration. A company is not just a legal entity. It is a commitment to building something larger than what one person can do.
HMD Corporation started as a way to formalise what I was already doing. It grew into something much bigger: a multinational holding company with subsidiaries across Technology, Finance, Entertainment, and Commerce. HMD Developments became the technology arm, with its own team of developers building enterprise-grade software.
Looking back at cizgi-dizi, I do not feel embarrassment. I feel gratitude. That terrible little website taught me to ship early, learn in public, and treat every broken thing as an opportunity. The gap between "this is broken" and "I could fix this" is where startups are born.
I went from a fan site to a multinational corporation in about two years. Not because I had some master plan, but because I kept building. Each project was slightly more ambitious than the last. Each failure taught me something the previous success had not.
The distance between your first website and your first startup is shorter than you think.