Five products, one working rule: start with the problem

I run five products. Noian turns a Shopify catalog into videos that post themselves. BenimEv lists property for foreign buyers. Savalan AI is an AI assistant that knows the business before it answers. ShopInHome gives artists their own branded shop. AGGZ is a marketplace for industrial machinery.

People ask how one person builds five products. The honest answer is that I did not start five companies at once, and I did not start with the technology. I started with a problem I could see clearly, then built the smallest thing that solved it, then kept going.

The problem came first every time. A Shopify merchant with a full catalog and no time to make videos: that became Noian. A foreign buyer who could not read a Turkish property listing: that became BenimEv. A business owner whose chatbot answered questions it did not understand: that became Savalan AI. An artist with good work and no shop of her own: that became ShopInHome. A factory owner with machines to sell and no trusted place to list them: that became AGGZ.

Starting with the problem keeps the work honest. When the problem is real, the first users tell you what is missing, and you build that next. When the problem is invented, you build features nobody asked for and wonder why nobody comes. I have made both mistakes, and the second one is more expensive.

Twenty years in digital marketing taught me the same lesson from the other side. Campaigns fail the same way products fail: they start with the tool instead of the person. A new ad format, a new channel, a new automation. The question that matters is simpler. Who is this for, and what do they need that they do not have today? Answer that clearly and the tool almost picks itself.

Building in Istanbul shapes the work too. My products serve buyers and sellers in more than one country and more than one language, so a product that only works in one market is a product I would have to rebuild later. I would rather build the multilingual version first, even when it is slower, because the second market always arrives sooner than expected.

None of this is a shortcut. Five products means five sets of users, five inboxes, five things that can break on the same day. What makes it possible is the rule itself. One problem, one small working answer, then the next problem. Repeat it long enough and the collection starts to look like a portfolio. It started as a list of problems worth solving.

I am Arel Aslan, an entrepreneur, MBA and full-stack product builder based in Istanbul, founder of Noian, BenimEv, Savalan AI, ShopInHome and AGGZ. You can find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arelaslan/