Today we’d like to introduce you to Ilgar Asgarli.
Hi Ilgar, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My story started in Baku, where I was born and grew up. After finishing university, I decided to continue my education in business administration, so I moved to Istanbul, one of the biggest and most dynamic cities in Europe. Right now, I am at the final stage of my master’s thesis, which is focused on marketing and how brands build trust with their customers. My next goal is to continue my academic journey and pursue a PhD.
But my interests have never been limited to studying. Since I was a teenager, I have been really interested in digital art. By the age of 20, I had developed professional skills in graphic design, 3D modeling, video editing, and animation. I started out as a freelancer, and later I became the main video editor for my friend’s channel, which now has more than 95,000 followers across YouTube and TikTok. That experience helped me realize what I was capable of, and eventually I became the lead art director at a Turkish company.
At the same time, I always wanted to use my skills to create something that could have a real impact on people’s lives. After living in Istanbul for three years, I started noticing some of the less positive sides of living in such a huge city. One thing that really stayed with me was seeing local bakeries and cafes throwing away bags full of fresh food at the end of the day. Donuts, croissants, sandwiches, all of it was being thrown away simply because it hadn’t been sold. It was difficult for me to see perfectly good food going straight into the trash.
Instead of just thinking about it, I decided to do some research myself. I went to local businesses and personally asked the owners a simple question: “What would you think about an app that could help you sell products that would otherwise be thrown away?” In about 95% of the cases, people were very supportive of the idea.
I combined my knowledge of marketing with the programming skills I had also developed and built a platform for businesses that helps them sell unsold food instead of wasting it. The company is currently going through the official registration process, so I am keeping the name private for now. But my goal is simple: I want to make a positive difference, starting here in Istanbul.
At the same time, my passion for creativity also led me to start my own independent game studio, eire Games. Together with my team, we are working on our first game. We are building it purely out of passion, without big investors or a large budget. We are doing everything ourselves, from development and writing the story to creating the artwork.
I am really proud to say that our first game is going to be released in just a few months.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The journey of a 24-year-old entrepreneur trying to build a life, a business, and an academic career in a new country has definitely not been an easy one. I think the biggest challenge for me has been learning how to balance completely different areas of my life, while giving each of them the time and attention they deserve.
Moving to a huge city like Istanbul was already a challenge on its own. I had to adapt to a completely new pace of life, work on a demanding master’s thesis, and at the same time handle an intense job as an art director. On top of that, teaching myself programming took a lot of late nights, sleepless nights, and a huge amount of self-discipline.
Starting a startup with a social purpose also comes with many challenges that people don’t always see. It’s one thing to get positive feedback from 95% of cafe owners, but it’s a completely different thing to turn that idea into a real B2B platform, go through all the legal steps to register a company, and build real trust with businesses and customers.
The same goes for eire Games. Creating a quality product from scratch, relying mostly on ourselves and without serious financial backing, has been a real test of patience and endurance.
But honestly, all these challenges have made me stronger. I am incredibly grateful to my family and the people close to me, because their support has always been and still is one of my biggest sources of strength.
Every challenge has taught me something new. And I think this journey, even though it hasn’t always been easy or straightforward, has played a huge part in making me the person I am today.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Right now, I am fully focused on the intersection of technology, business, and social responsibility. As the founder and future CEO of a tech startup, I want to create innovative solutions that are not only commercially successful, but also have a positive impact on society and the environment. At the moment, my main mission is to help fight food waste, especially in huge cities like Istanbul.
My main project is a B2B platform and mobile app designed to help businesses manage and sell their unsold food. We are basically building a digital bridge between food businesses and customers, giving fresh food a second chance instead of letting it go to waste.
We are currently going through the official company registration and trademark process, so I can’t publicly share the full name of the company yet. I need to keep it private for now because of confidentiality and intellectual property concerns. But I can say that there is a huge amount of work happening behind the scenes to turn this idea into a real business.
If I had to say what makes me different from other young entrepreneurs, I would probably say it’s the combination of my skills and my hands-on approach. I am not just a business student with an interesting idea. My background in graphic design, my experience as an art director, and the programming skills I taught myself allow me to look at a product from many different angles.
I can personally work on almost every part of the project, from writing the first lines of code and designing an intuitive UX/UI to developing a marketing strategy based on my academic research into brand trust. I don’t have to wait for someone else to turn my ideas into something visual. If I have an idea, I can just sit down and build it myself.
I also don’t want to build a business from behind a desk. I prefer to go out there and talk directly to cafe and bakery owners, understand their real problems, and build solutions based on what they actually need.
But what I am most proud of is not the technology or the design. I am most proud that I was able to take a simple feeling of empathy, the feeling I had when I saw perfectly good food being thrown away on the streets of Istanbul, and turn it into something real that could actually help people.
Knowing that my platform can help businesses while also reducing food waste and making our cities a little cleaner and more sustainable is what makes me truly proud. And honestly, that is also what motivates me to keep moving forward.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Moving to Istanbul was probably one of the biggest turning points for me. I found myself in the right environment to notice a serious problem with food waste that was happening all around me.
But I also had a pretty painful experience during the early stages of development. Just two days before I was supposed to show the first prototype to real potential customers, my hard drive suddenly crashed. Because of my busy schedule, I hadn’t backed up the latest versions of my code and designs to the cloud.
I basically had to rebuild the entire project from scratch. The second time around, I wrote the code much faster, and I also rebuilt the app’s architecture in a much cleaner and more logical way.
Looking back, that failure actually taught me an important lesson. From that point on, I introduced strict backup protocols right from the beginning. So, in a strange way, losing everything actually made the project stronger. Today, all the data and development work behind our B2B platform is protected much more securely.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrfoodiemore/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilqar-asgarli-eire/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Кадзе
