Caner Bayraktar: The story to 3M MAU

A 27-year arc, a near-accidental $1B miss, a broken-code comeback at 2am, and a man who built the internet for a country — and then built the prayer app for 3 million Muslims.

It's 1999. Caner started with a Celeron.

A Celeron in Turkey in 1999 was extraordinary. Turkey had ~3 million internet users. A kid with a Celeron dreaming of building the internet for his country is cinematic. Caner remembers this time with, in his own words:

“What I dream I can make.I had ideas and the computer was my teletransportation to my dream”

He didn't know it then, but he was about to spend the next 27 years proving that sentence true, one product at a time.

2004. The first empire chapter.

Before App Stores, before streaming, when software lived on CDs or sketchy websites. Caner built the one that wasn’t sketchy, Tamindir, which quickly became Turkey's biggest download site in 2024. By 2026, Caner estimates that

“every single household computer in Turkiye has visited Tamindir at least once.”

To run it, he dropped out of a Mathematics degree and hired his high school friends to work on the 1M DAU website with him. And that’s how Caner makes decisions: instinct over institution, traction over theory. He successfully graduated from an open university in Business Administration later on. He started hiring his school friends for Tamindir. The dream of every entrepreneur, have such a successful company that you can bring your old friends in.

It’s 2008.

Caner saw the Turkish gaming market almost before anyone else did. He co-founded a hypercasual gaming studio, which he exited at an early stage. That studio is valued at roughly $1B today. No founder forgets a number like that.

It’s 2016

Caner launched Muslim, a prayer times, Qibla direction, and Quran app for Muslim users worldwide. He didn’t obsess over it.

It’s 2018.

Caner started investing and cofounding multiple other companies, including a pet subscription business that started in Turkiye and quickly expanded to the UK, attracting 50 angel investors. Today the Turkiye unit is still run by his brother.

Caner moved to Los Angeles and lived the American dream for some time.

By then, Ecommerce was the big thing, and he was making it — and winning it — there too. Caner and his friends launched a ranking-optimization startup for Amazon sellers, scaled it to 100K SKUs, sold it, and returned to Turkiye. While building ecommerce businesses, Caner also launched his first Qibla Finder.

It’s 2019.

Caner got married in Turkiye. The happy couple moved to the UK. Happy entrepreneurship life with new ventures…until COVID hit.

2020 I The App Store picked up Muslim

2am plane landing, broken code, manual script to 8am to save subscribers. Caner was a faith-tech visionary and launched Muslim app in 2015. Muslim started generating revenue from App Store organic traffic, but he barely looked at it as he was busy with other projects. In 2016, almost as a side thought, Caner launched Muslim, a prayer times, Qibla direction, and Quran app for Muslim users worldwide. He didn’t obsess over it. He was busy with other things. But the App Store had other plans. The app picked it up organically, and the revenue started coming in: Month one: $1,000. Month two: $6,000. Month three: $20,000. The app remained pretty much untouched until 2020, when Caner received investment from Teknasyon and decided to focus on mobile subscription apps.

The first day subscriptions went live, 2,000 trials came in… Caner was on a plane from London to Istanbul. When he landed at 2a.m. a notification from his developer: “something is broken, and by the time the trial period is over, all the trials will be canceled” Caner raced home and opened his laptop. Wrote a script. He then ran it manually for each user, one by one, through the night. He recovered 1,500 trial users from cancellations by 8 a.m. on that same morning. They woke up that morning with no idea what had almost happened. Caner had made sure of it.

And that’s how they started with App Subscriptions. And that was his first learning of the importance of having highly skilled individuals in your team. In the middle, he also released Qibla Finder and Quoran 360.

It’s 2026

Twenty-seven years after a teenager in Istanbul pointed a Celeron at the internet and said “I can make what I dream” — the proof is the millions of users who use his apps every day.Caner is thinking about beach views now. He loves sailing. He has twins, a wife, a life that has earned its pace. For the first time in 10 years, he's open to handing something he built to someone else, a new house that understands the Muslim community and wants to build with and for them.

As his friend said, “You go from Macbook Pro to Macbook Air, Then from Macbook Air to iPad, That’s when the life starts”

EHVM’s Evelin Herrera is representing Caner’s faith-tech business on the exit. Contact Evelin directly at evelin@ehvmcapital.com for more information.