From English Teacher to Running a $40k Web Development Agency: Umut Topal's Story

A YouTube Video Changed Everything

Umut Topal taught English at a college in Istanbul. Steady work, decent pay. But the job felt mechanical. "It was like go there, take something, and come back home with money," he says. No room to create. No space to think.

That might have stayed buried if not for his uncle, the family's only computer engineer and the person who first sat Umut in front of a screen at age six. One day, his uncle found Readdy in a YouTube video about AI tools. He sent Umut a message: Take a look at this. You can do it. You have imagination.

Umut had no coding background. He didn't know what frontend or backend meant. He had never heard of React, JSON, or Supabase. But he clicked the link anyway.

Six Days and a Leap of Faith

At first, Umut assumed Readdy worked like every other AI tool. Type something in, get a generic result out. But when he started exploring, he realized this was different. "You can create something totally new," he says. "If you have any idea, you can create it as a website. That is the most exciting reason for me."

His first project was a product showcase site for a large company. It took six days. By his own admission, the result wasn't great. But it was done, it was real, and the client paid for it.

That was the proof he needed.

He bought a Readdy starter pack and began creating demo sites for potential clients. Then Newsmesh, a major Turkish media company, called. They wanted a full website renovation plus social media management. Umut delivered something that surprised even himself: a completely original navigation bar, a different hero section, a layout unlike anything else on the market.

"I felt like, OK, you did it," he recalls. "You did something exceptional."

Imagination as a Competitive Edge

What sets Umut apart isn't technical skill. It's design instinct. He doesn't copy templates or browse Dribbble for inspiration. He starts with a question: If I were this client, what would I want?

He recently built a site for a manga creator. Instead of a standard portfolio layout, he designed character cards embedded in the navigation bar with hover effects that revealed each character's universe, backstory, and visual world. Every section came from the perspective of someone who actually reads manga, not someone who builds websites.

When clients hear he uses an AI tool, they assume it's just another drag-and-drop builder. Then they see the work. "It's nothing like that," Umut says. "And they like it."

He has a simple philosophy about working with AI: one task, one prompt. "If you keep pushing it with multiple things, it will change the rest of the website," he explains. "We shouldn't forget that it is not a human being. It's an AI that also understands and learns with us." He crafts his prompts carefully, sometimes using ChatGPT to draft a 2,500-character prompt, then editing it down before feeding it into Readdy.

Quitting the Classroom

Umut quit teaching to build websites full time. He hasn't looked back.

The early days were scrappy. He opened an Instagram page called Odinweb Media and messaged people directly: Do you need a professional website? No ads, no marketing funnel. Just cold outreach and demo sites that spoke for themselves.

His pricing is simple. A landing page costs around $50. A multi-page business site with admin panel and e-commerce tops out around $230. He includes free hosting, domain, and SSL, services other Turkish developers charge separately for. He offers a special discount for women business owners. And he's available sixteen hours a day.

"As long as I am up, you can always reach me and tell me something about your website, and I will fix it ASAP," he says.

When he started running Meta ads, he received nineteen inquiries and closed several new clients within days. In Turkey, those numbers are rare. Not for lack of demand, but because of a deep trust deficit. Developers have taken money and vanished, shutting down clients' sites without warning. Umut has heard these stories firsthand. Earning business meant proving, over and over, that he was reliable.

"People don't trust each other," he says. "The most important thing for me is being trustworthy."

Building Things He Never Imagined

What Umut builds today would surprise anyone who knows his background. He creates Progressive Web Apps with push notification systems through Supabase. He builds e-commerce sites integrated with Turkish payment gateways like Easycall and Paytr, systems that don't share standard APIs, so he constructs the infrastructure from scratch. He designs admin panels that let clients manage their own content. He built a window measurement calculator where customers input dimensions and instantly see pricing.

He maintains all of it himself, running three Readdy accounts managing over twenty websites, four Progressive Web Apps, and several social media clients, with another four to five projects in the pipeline.

And he doesn't always need a computer. The manga site? Built entirely on his phone.

"I started with a phone, you know," he says. "I'm still using my phone when I'm outside."

"For Me, It's Life-Changing. Literally."

When asked to describe Readdy in one sentence, Umut pauses. Then he makes it personal.

"It was life-changing. Literally."

The math tells part of the story. He spends around $300 a month on Readdy across his accounts. He now earns between 250,000 and 400,000 Turkish lira per month. Before Readdy, even an experienced developer in Turkey needed fifteen days minimum to build one site, two per month at most. Umut says he can now build ten in a day, depending on complexity.

But the numbers aren't the point. What changed is bigger than income.

"I started to earn a lot, meet and connect with new people," he says. "Now whoever I work with, they always say the same thing: you are trustworthy, you are fast, you are quick."

Not bad for an English teacher who, not long ago, knew nothing about coding. His most powerful tool turned out to be the one thing no AI can replicate: imagination and the conviction to keep going.