Founder and CEO of Yemeksepeti, Nevzat Aydın, after graduating from Boğaziçi University Computer Engineering Department, went to San Francisco, which is accepted as a start-up center, to study e-commerce in 2000. While studying here, he conducted detailed research on successful enterprises in the USA and their business models. Make it to the attention of the idea of ordering food over the Internet during the investigation that he left his job in half the training to implement the idea and immediately returned to Turkey. He shared this idea with his closest friends, Cem Nufusi and Melih Ödemiş, based on the idea that restaurants take food orders from users online.

Yemeksepeti's three founding partners were hired in a 40 square meter office and immediately started restaurant negotiations. They received a rejection response from the first fifteen restaurants they interviewed. Although they had a hard time convincing the restaurants in the first place, they set out with 26 restaurants after a difficult agreement process. In the first place, they received their orders by printer and fax, and this practice continued for a long time.

They then signed a partnership agreement with the German Samwer brothers, who are the founders of the Rocket Internet company. Following this partnership, the orders of the company increased and Yemeksepeti reached 25 thousand orders per day in 2010 in the market where it started with one or two orders per day. For the first five years of this ten-year period, they tried to survive with almost no money. Thanks to their belief in their ideas, they managed to be a good team and maintain the stability of the company.

The food basket, which started to receive orders via mobile via iPhone, reached 900 thousand users by the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. In 2012, General Atlantic made an investment of 44 million dollars in Yemeksepeti, and became a minority shareholder in the company. After this investment, the growth of Yemeksepeti started to increase exponentially. In May 2015, Germany-based Delivery Hero company bought 100% of the company's shares for $ 589 million. Nevzat Aydın is still the CEO of Yemeksepeti. Although it is not known how long he will remain in this position, Yemeksepeti's story continues to be one of the most successful stories of Turkish internet entrepreneurship.

Born in Istanbul in 1976, Melih Ödemiş graduated from Austrian High School and then from Boğaziçi University Computer Engineering Department. He worked in the treasury department of Citibank for a year in the development of software for the use of the treasury. At the same time, he started his MBA at Boğaziçi University. After the establishment of Yemeksepeti, he completed his MBA in 2002.  

Melih Ödemiş, who always wanted to make an initiative about the internet during his university education and especially because of the department he studied, was closely following the developments in the internet. When Nevzat Aydin told the business idea itself Yemeksepeti rapidly growing fast in Turkey - with food and packaging sector due to the masses of Internet users believe that this business has a great potential. Then he did market research with Nevzat Aydın and started talking to restaurants. Yemeksepeti was realized with the personal experience of the founding partners and the support provided by their families. In addition, they worked for years without pay.

While determining the name of Yemeksepeti, they took care not to have Turkish characters in it, to be easy to understand and sympathetic. They were a little inspired by baskets that were hung from glass in ancient times.

The number of Internet users with the start of the ADSL service in 2004, Turkey has been a very rapid increase. This has become a turning point not only for Yemeksepeti but for all internet companies that have managed to survive until then. There has been a rapid growth in the market. In addition, they started to benefit from this network after they were elected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs in 2007.  

Care was taken to preserve the unique communication character of the brand in the establishment and activities of the marketing team that manages the positioning of the brand and especially the communication with the user. Melih Ödemiş underlines that the foundations of this success story are a good team, too much patience and immeasurable effort. He points out that well-planned business models and taking the right steps are among the main factors that create this success story.

Suggestions for Entrepreneurs

As one of the important entrepreneurs of the sector, Melih Ödemiş offers some suggestions to entrepreneurs who want to be successful about what they should and should not do. According to Ödemiş, entrepreneurs should not only focus on success stories and create rosy pictures for themselves, and they should not forget that entrepreneurship is a very difficult process that requires patience and sacrifice. He carefully emphasizes that entrepreneurs need to have knowledge in the sector they choose to operate and that being an entrepreneur in a sector is not meaningful just because it is a trend. Speaking about the importance of well-equipped entrepreneurs and knowing a foreign language, Ödemiş says that not knowing a foreign language is one of the most important obstacles to success. It is important to be able to change and adapt ideas to markets without getting stuck in a particular business idea, and business ideas and models that can adapt to the dynamics of the markets in an agile manner are able to survive.  If a model is not successful, it should not be insisted on. In addition, the fact that the entrepreneurs feel economically secure even at the lowest level can directly affect the success of the enterprises until they reach the break-even point. Melih Ödemiş states that one of the most important factors that bring success is always thinking big but being able to move quickly with small steps.