About me.

Hey, I’m Doğukan.

I’ve spent most of my adult life building things, learning through failure, and eventually (?) finding ways to make them work. My curiosity, ability to learn quickly and mom’s positivity probably carried me through it all.

Everything began with Gamer Papers, a gaming and esports news publishing platform that grew to more than 70K monthly users, doing content and SEO marketing while I was there. I learned what SEO growth strategies were in college and later tried to make the best of it in gaming. We also organized and worked on multiple events during that time.

I later entered blockchain with little more than curiosity and a willingness to learn. I started working for protocols I had invested in, doing social media and community management. After some time, everybody wanted to work with me and the people in my circle, especially Ege, who later became my co-founder.

So naturally Ege and I brought our strengths together and founded AdminGuru. It started as a service business where I trained friends around us, technical fundamentals, and community management, then helped them take on roles across different protocols. We eventually grew it into an 18-person Web3 growth agency that generated over $1M in lifetime revenue

After a while, we stopped being a growth agency and turned into a builder group, launching different crypto primitives and receiving grants from major ecosystems such as Matic, Neon, Fantom, and Kava for over $500k. After the hype faded and many people moved on, with our final push we co-founded Zentra Labs, built a money market protocol, and joined Citrea Origins, an incubation program at the time.

After many years in the trenches, both my interests and the industry began to shift. The growth game became way too expensive and mercenary, and the ability to grow something organically diminished significantly within the industry. My first experience post crypto was with Synnada Labs, an AI infrastructure company. I was able to dive into an entirely different domain, learning about infrastructure, bottlenecks, generative media, how models behave and perform the best, what users say and even technical details like benchmarks, evals, agentic systems within a matter of weeks. Those changes ultimately made the transition to AI and NewFrame smoother. There, I worked closely on Madison’s product direction and core workflows, helping shape a creative media agent that turns brand context into concepts, images, video, and campaign assets.

During that time, I also built my own Hermes-based operating setup around the work, connecting research, GTM, product development, meetings, and communication running it all from the same context and setup. The transition from six years of B2C to B2B work wasn’t as hard as I expected. With the help of LLMs, I was able to experiment, learn, and use many different apps and tools thanks to my beloved Hermes agent. (Always a plug.)

What I love

I love working on complex problems, trying to figure out the best solution towards a situation and finding a way through it.

In gaming, that meant learning how people discover things through search. In crypto, it meant understanding how narratives move through X, Reddit, and communities, as well as how financial incentives work. In AI, it has meant studying how people react to a product, which capabilities matter to them, and what earns a positive response when you put something in front of the market. Different industries, different tools but always the people.

I also love anything A/B testing. I love generating ideas, gathering feedback, improving, and trying to find the best solution to a problem. This learning loop makes the work feel a lot less like work and turns it into something I genuinely enjoy. As someone who tries a bunch of things, I also make a lot of mistakes, which is probably why this way of working suits me so well.

I do my best work with kind, fast-moving people who can give direct and harsh feedback when it is needed. Once we find the right direction and have clarity, I love moving in focused sprints. I usually can’t stop until the work is finished, and to be honest, that obsession has also hurt me in the past. I can confidently say that I am very familiar and comfortable with ambiguity, as long as we are in motion.

Outside work

I’m an incurable hobbyist. I love games, scuba diving, airsoft, billiards, off-roading, Magic: The Gathering, and trading card games in general. I enjoy trying new things and sticking with the ones that can become a real part of my life rather than a temporary interest.

I could also have written about 10 more things I’ve tried or taken workshops and courses on, but that’s probably too much outside-work information.

Get in touch

I always enjoy meeting new people, exchanging ideas, and hearing what others are building. If you’re working on something interesting, wrestling with a difficult problem, or just want to connect, just say hi. Always down for coffee!