Emre Fadıllıoğlu and the business of the second visit

An app can win a download and still lose its customer before the day is out. Emre Fadıllıoğlu has built businesses around both halves of that awkward transaction. AppSamurai helps applications find users. Storyly gives those applications ways to hold a conversation once somebody arrives. Between the advertisement and the return visit lies a surprisingly large amount of work, much of it performed on a screen small enough to disappear into a trouser pocket.

His career follows that gap. It runs from finance and business development through digital marketing agencies to a group of software products concerned with acquisition, advertising fraud and engagement. The progression has a certain practical tidiness: first help the client do the job, then build something that makes the job easier to repeat. A marketing agency learns where the hours go. A software company attempts to give some of them back.

Today, Fadıllıoğlu is the co-founder and CEO of AppSamurai and Storyly, based in the London area. His work connects a Turkish entrepreneurial background with customers and colleagues across borders. The subject is mobile growth, but his recurring concern is rather older than the smartphone: how to persuade people to come back.

Before the software, the service

Fadıllıoğlu studied business administration at Middle East Technical University in Turkey and completed executive leadership education at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. His corporate experience included PwC, Inta Spaceturk, Enerjisa and Oracle, with responsibilities across finance, sales and business development. This was a route through established organizations before he began creating his own.

Netvent, the digital marketing agency he co-founded in 2013, came first. Growth Tower, a mobile marketing agency, followed in 2015. The sequence matters because these were businesses close to the daily work of finding customers. They put the problem of growth in front of a team before it became a platform’s promise. AppSamurai, established in 2016, followed those agency ventures.

There is an appealing lack of sudden revelation in that chronology. The steps get narrower and more specific: digital marketing, mobile marketing, then products for mobile businesses. Read as a career rather than a collection of company names, it suggests an entrepreneur returning to a familiar problem with a different set of tools.

A download is only an introduction

In a January 2023 podcast conversation, Fadıllıoğlu described a familiar inefficiency: mobile growth involved manual consulting work and expertise that could be difficult to access. His answer was to automate that work and make the accumulated knowledge available through products. It is a proposition that makes sense coming from someone whose earlier companies sold marketing services.

He also placed an unfashionably basic requirement ahead of the advertising machinery. “The product itself is really important.” A growth platform can distribute an application; it cannot supply the reason a person should want it. His advice included beginning with organic efforts and testing established networks on a small scale. The order is useful: learn something before paying to repeat it.

He explained Storyly in the same conversation as a response to what happens after acquisition. Bringing people in leaves the question of keeping them interested. That observation joins the two companies more neatly than a corporate diagram could. One works on the introduction, the other on what there might be to say afterward. A download is a promising handshake, but nobody should mistake it for a friendship.

“The product itself is really important.”

Emre Fadıllıoğlu · January 2023

Three products, three awkward questions

The product family makes that expanding interest visible. AppSamurai handles user acquisition. Interceptd addresses advertising fraud. Storyly brings the familiar story format into mobile applications and websites. Each tackles a different uncertainty: who will arrive, whether the traffic is legitimate, and what will keep a person engaged.

The distinction is worth preserving. More traffic does not automatically answer a question about its quality, and a functioning advertising campaign does not write the content inside an app. Fadıllıoğlu’s companies divide a broad commercial ambition into specific jobs. It is a sensible way to approach a word as elastic as growth, which can otherwise stretch to cover almost anything on a presentation slide.

His fellow founders include Mehmet Bilgin and Soner Şensoy, both named alongside him by investor 212. The current AppSamurai leadership team lists Bilgin as CTO and Şensoy as CRO. Behind the individual founder’s story sits that division of responsibilities: technology, revenue and the work of running the company. The photograph may have one subject; the enterprise has several authors.

The small circle with a commercial job

Storyly launched in January 2020. Its starting point was recognizable: the full-screen story format people already knew from social platforms could also live inside a brand’s own application. Recognition reduces the amount of explaining required. A person who understands how to tap through a story has already learned part of the interface.

By 2023, Fadıllıoğlu was discussing uses ranging from onboarding to shopping. Footasylum offered one illustration of how flexible the presentation could be, using rectangular story placements. The circle was optional; the idea was a layer of content inside an existing experience. That detail makes the product easier to understand than the abstract language of engagement. The format can adapt to the shop rather than require the shop to resemble a social network.

He also described asking people about their preferences through interactive content. A question about a favorite color could group respondents for more relevant messages. The mechanism is modest enough to sound almost obvious, which is part of its appeal. Ask a question, pay attention to the answer, and avoid showing everyone exactly the same thing.

The commercial interest is clear, but the interaction remains recognizably human. A retailer wants to understand a shopper. A shopper may welcome a useful suggestion. Storyly places polls, questions and other interactive elements in the space between those intentions. The challenge is making the exchange worthwhile enough that a person chooses to participate.

Fun, with a business model attached

Fadıllıoğlu’s own writing makes room for pleasure in a field prone to treating customers as numbers moving between boxes. In his 2023 mobile marketing forecast, he discussed gamified onboarding, progress bars, achievements, scavenger hunts and rewards. These are practical devices for making an experience more inviting. They also require a marketer to imagine what the user might actually enjoy.

His argument extended to discovery. People opening their phones do not always arrive carrying a tidy shopping list. They might be looking for entertainment, connection or an interesting distraction. A brand’s application has to account for those less orderly intentions. The customer has neglected to read the conversion funnel.

He also advocated user-generated content, community features and short video. Together, these interests describe a shop with more happening inside it than a catalogue and a checkout. The ambition is to make an owned digital space worth visiting in its own right. That is a demanding brief for a piece of software, but it explains why his thinking moves repeatedly beyond the first install.

A company built across borders

The international ambition appeared early. In a 2018 interview, Fadıllıoğlu said AppSamurai had users in 155 countries and generated 75 percent of its revenue abroad. Those figures belong to that moment, but they show that expansion outside Turkey was already part of the operating reality. His stated aspiration was to build a global brand originating in Turkey and a company people wanted to work for.

Later, discussing investment, he emphasized relationships established before money was needed. He had already been in contact with investors who joined the funding round, including 212 and Collective Spark. He also described turning some investors down. Capital arrived with a prospective partner attached, and compatibility mattered over the length of that partnership.

External recognition supplies another dated marker. AppSamurai appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2022, 2024 and 2025; its 2025 position was 4,353. Rankings are snapshots, but repeated appearances help locate the business beyond its launch announcement. By then the story had acquired the less theatrical substance of an operating company with years behind it.

The next app belongs to them

In September 2026, Fadıllıoğlu shared an update about Apps Prize, a play-and-earn application built by the team. After years of helping other businesses grow their apps, AppSamurai had shipped one of its own. He described a progression from an SDK to a rewarded API and then the consumer application. The company was taking its accumulated experience into a product people could use directly.

That move adds a fresh turn to the career. The agency founder became a platform founder; the platform team became an app maker. The questions remain familiar, but responsibility for the answers moves closer. When the application is yours, the advertising campaign and the experience after the click meet under the same roof.

There is also a smaller ambition running beside those company plans. Fadıllıoğlu has spoken about enjoying writing and wishing he had made it a daily habit earlier. He has advised founders to celebrate smaller achievements along the way. For someone working in an industry that measures taps and returns, that is a useful allowance: a career can accumulate through ordinary days as well as funding rounds.

His businesses keep circling a plain question: what earns another visit? It applies to the app, the customer relationship and the company people choose to build together. The first click may start the story. Fadıllıoğlu has spent much of his working life making room for the next one.