The Evza Viral: How a Fake 90s Website Changed My Career

Some ideas arrive in meetings. Mine arrived while I was cleaning the office.

It was early 2013. During my master’s I had founded Evza, a small brand management agency in the Nish Istanbul towers. We built websites, brand identities and marketing campaigns for clients of every size, and we were good at it. But like every young agency, we had a problem: nobody knew who we were.

So, broom in hand, I had a slightly mad thought. What if we made our own website as bad as humanly possible?

The worst agency website ever made

We took evza.com and rebuilt it in proper late-90s style: a cheerful knock-off of an IKEA-style site, clashing colours, and content that got stranger the deeper you clicked. Some of my favourite touches:

• An “English version” that, in Turkish, politely informed “our valued foreign visitors” that the English page would be ready soon, and that they were welcome to email us in English in the meantime.
• A service menu with a chick-painting department. Yes, really. A painstakingly serious price list offered to dye baby chicks in bright colours: “painting only, if you bring the chicks yourself”, or a premium package with the chicks included.
• An events page promoting services so absurd, online matchmaking among them, that people genuinely couldn’t tell whether we were a real agency, a scam or performance art.

The key was to never wink. There was no “just kidding” banner and no punchline. The site played it completely straight.

Then the internet found it

Within days the link was everywhere. Ekşi Sözlük, Turkey’s legendary collaborative dictionary, opened a thread that ran to nine pages. People argued about whether it was a real company, a viral stunt, or “developers who never got paid taking their revenge”.

Twitter joined in too. Designers, marketers and journalists shared it, some laughing, some warning their followers not to believe the price list, and some calling it a treasure.

• 200k+unique visitors
• 9pages on Ekşi Sözlük
• 1newspaper cover
• 0chicks actually painted

More than 200,000 unique visitors came to the site. The best part? Most of them never realised it was ironic. That uncertainty, is this real?, was exactly what kept people sharing it.

“Böyle olur doktora öğrencisinin virali”

A few weeks later, Hürriyet’s university supplement Kampüs put the story on its cover: “This is what a doctoral student’s viral looks like.” Brightly painted chicks and all.

When the campaign was over, the site quietly went back to its normal, respectable self. We wrapped it up with one last video, recorded in intentionally terrible English, of course.

What it actually did

I’ve always given this viral more space in my story than it probably deserves, and here’s why. It worked on every level we hoped for, and then on one we never expected.

Evza won a stream of new projects, big and small. Advertising and marketing people we admired got in touch to say they loved it. For a while, it seemed almost everyone in the industry had heard of it.

And then, a few months later, a manager in Turkish Airlines’ Interactive Marketing department, who would later become my manager, came across it and invited me to join the team. In 2013 I started my corporate career at Turkish Airlines, a story you can read more about on my about page.

A broom, a bad idea and a lot of painted chicks. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

This post is adapted from a longer Turkish piece on my startup story, originally published on Medium.