Founder authority sites: how personal sites relate to a group and its companies

People trust people. When someone evaluates a new company — a merchant considering an AI tool for their store, a brand deciding whether to book talent through a marketplace, a journalist writing about a venture group — one of the first things they do is look for who is behind it. Search engines and AI assistants do something similar. They try to connect organisations to the people who run them and weigh what those people have done.

A founder authority site is where that connection starts. It is the founder's own home on the web: their work, their experience, their perspective, published under their own name.

Oryvelon has two founders, and each has their own site: Uğur Keser at ugurkeser.art and Sinem Keser at sinemkeser.com.tr. This article explains what those sites are for, how they relate to the group and the companies, and why the links between them are deliberately contextual. The approach generalises to any founder running more than one venture.

Why founders need their own sites

A founder could, in principle, live entirely on the company website — a bio on the About page, a byline on articles. For a single company that is often enough. It stops being enough in a few common situations.

The founder's work is broader than one company. Uğur's background spans many years of e-commerce, Shopify, advertising, AI and automation work. Sinem's spans brand, social, creator and fashion work. Neither maps neatly onto a single company, and a group site is the wrong place to present a person's full body of work.

The founder's voice is personal. Company sites speak as "we". A founder site can speak as "I": opinions, lessons, work in progress. That voice is valuable, and it is out of place on a company page.

Credibility travels with the person. If a founder builds a new company, their reputation comes with them. A personal site that accumulates their work over years is a stable anchor that no single company site can provide.

Machines need a clear entity for the person. Search engines and AI assistants build entities for people as well as organisations. A founder with no home of their own is described from scattered fragments — a directory listing here, a social profile there. A clear, consistent personal site gives them one authoritative source.

Three kinds of site, three distinct jobs

The key to making founder sites work alongside a group and its companies is being clear about which site does what. We think of it as three layers.

Each site does its own job well and describes the others briefly and accurately. None tries to do another's job.

A founder site does not become a second group site, with company descriptions and product pages. The group site does not become a founder showcase. A company site does not become a page about the founders' careers. When a visitor or a machine lands on any of them, it should be immediately clear what kind of site it is and who it belongs to.

This mirrors how we think about brands across the group generally — a house of brands with light endorsement rather than one master brand stretched across everything. See Naming, domains and brand architecture.

A naming detail that matters: sinemkeser.com.tr vs sinemkeser.com

One of our companies carries a founder's name: Sinem Keser Beauty Academy, which offers beauty services, education and digital products at sinemkeser.com. Sinem's personal founder site is at sinemkeser.com.tr.

That is exactly the kind of situation where people and machines get confused, so we are explicit about it:

• sinemkeser.com is a company. It has customers, courses, services and products. It is an Oryvelon company and follows the same standards as the others: its own analytics, its own data, its own source of truth.
• sinemkeser.com.tr is a person's site. It presents Sinem Keser's own work and perspective across brand, social, creator and fashion work, and it mentions the academy in context as one of the things she has built.

The rule for both sites is to say clearly what they are near the top of the page, and to link to each other only where it makes sense, with plain labels — "Sinem Keser Beauty Academy" pointing to the academy, "Sinem Keser" pointing to the personal site. On oryvelon.com the distinction is built in: the academy's company page links to sinemkeser.com, while the About page and the founder markup point to sinemkeser.com.tr.

If you have a company named after a founder, write down which domain is which, in the company's source-of-truth document, before anyone publishes anything. Untangling a merged entity later is slow.

How the sites link to each other

This is where many founders go wrong. The instinct is to link everything to everything: a footer on the personal site listing every company with keyword-rich anchor text, a sidebar of logos on every page, a "portfolio" block repeated sitewide. It feels like it should help.

It usually does not. Sitewide, keyword-stuffed links between related properties look manipulative to search engines, because that is a well-known pattern of link schemes. They add little for readers, who learn to ignore repeated blocks. And they blur the distinct jobs of each site.

Our rule is simple: links are contextual. A link from a founder site to the group or a company appears where the content genuinely calls for it.

What contextual looks like

• On Uğur's site, a piece about running e-commerce operations can naturally mention MerchNivo, the AI e-commerce employee for Shopify stores, and link to it once, with its name as the anchor text.
• A note about learning from a real store can mention Noveniq and why the group operates it.
• On Sinem's site, work about creators and brand collaboration can mention CastLyra, the marketplace for verified creative talent.
• Each founder site's about section is the natural place to say, in a sentence, that they co-founded Oryvelon, with a link to oryvelon.com.

What we avoid

• The same block of company links on every page.
• Anchor text written for keywords rather than readers ("best Shopify AI tool" instead of "MerchNivo").
• Links to companies from content that has nothing to do with them.
• Hidden, tiny or footer-only link lists.
• Reciprocal link swaps arranged for their own sake.

In the other direction

oryvelon.com names both founders on its About page, with a one-line description of each and a link to their site. The group's structured data lists each founder as a Person with a URL pointing to their own site. Company sites mention the founders where it is natural — an About page, a press page — without turning into founder showcases.

All of these links are tagged according to our UTM standards: links between the group and the founder sites use utm_medium=referral and utm_campaign=founder, so each site can see the traffic in its own analytics without anyone sharing user data.

Structured data for founders

Search engines and AI assistants connect people to organisations largely through consistent, explicit signals. Structured data is the most direct of those signals.

On oryvelon.com, the Organization markup includes a founder list. Each founder is a Person with:

• name, spelled consistently with diacritics — Uğur Keser, Sinem Keser;
• url, pointing to their own authority site;
• sameAs, listing profiles that describe the same person, such as their own site and professional profiles.

On each founder site, the corresponding Person markup should point back: the same name, the same sameAs set, and a reference to the organisations they founded or work with. When both sides agree, machines can resolve the person, the group and the companies into a clear graph: this person founded this group; this group has these sub-organisations; this company is endorsed by this group.

The details of how we mark up the group and its companies are in llms.txt and structured data.

A few rules keep founder markup honest:

• Only claim roles that are accurate and visible on the page.
• Keep names identical everywhere. "Ugur Keser" and "Uğur Keser" are the same person to a human, but consistency helps machines; we use the correct spelling in markup and make sure the plain-ASCII form appears naturally in text so searches without diacritics still resolve.
• Do not list every company as worksFor on a founder's page if the relationship is really "founded the group that operates it". Precision is more useful than volume.

What a founder site should contain

There is no single template, but good founder authority sites tend to share a few elements.

A clear statement of who the person is. Name, what they do, and the organisations they are associated with, in the first screen. Written plainly, so it can be quoted.

Their own work. Projects, writing, talks, case notes — whatever represents their expertise. For Uğur that centres on e-commerce, Shopify, AI and automation. For Sinem, brand, social, creator and fashion work. Their sites should reflect the depth of that experience rather than simply listing it.

Perspective. Opinions and lessons in their own voice. This is what makes a personal site worth reading and what distinguishes it from a company page.

Honest relationships. A short section on the organisations they founded or lead, each with one sentence and a link. Accurate, not inflated.

A way to get in touch that routes correctly. Enquiries about a company's product should go to that company; enquiries about agency-type services go to WeAreMedia, the group's services company — not to the group or the founder personally. Being clear about this is a courtesy to the person asking.

What it should not contain: invented metrics, borrowed logos of clients the founder has not worked with, or claims the person could not back up in conversation. Authority built on exaggeration does not last, and AI assistants are increasingly good at repeating exactly what they read — including the exaggerations.

Keeping data separate

Founder sites are personal properties, and they follow the same data boundaries as everything else in the group.

Each founder site has its own analytics, set up with the same privacy-respecting approach as the companies. Visitors to a founder site are not tracked onto the group site or the companies' sites, and no identifiers are shared between them. A newsletter on a founder site is that founder's list, with its own consent; it is not quietly merged into a company's marketing list. See Analytics without surveillance and Marketing consent vs product consent.

This matters more than it might seem. The value of a founder's audience comes from trust. Using it as a feeder for company marketing without consent would spend that trust quickly.

How founder sites help the companies

The benefit of founder sites to the companies is real, but indirect, and it is worth describing accurately.

They answer "who is behind this?" When someone researching KeşifAtlası or EduRelia wants to know who runs it, the trail leads from the company to the group to the founders, each step clear and consistent. That is a trust signal for people and for machines.

They carry context no company site can. A founder's long-form thinking about e-commerce operations, creative work or company building gives background that would be out of place on a product site.

They support a clear entity graph. Consistent person markup, consistent descriptions and contextual links help search engines and AI assistants describe the founders, the group and the companies correctly. See Search and AI visibility for companies.

What founder sites are not is a growth hack. They do not replace each company earning its own visibility on its own domain, and we do not measure their success by how much traffic they push to companies. We measure it by whether they represent the founders well.

When a founder starts a new company

The founder site earns its keep most visibly when something new begins. Every company we start goes through a validation phase before it is scaled, often with a simple phase-zero site that tests whether the problem and the customer are real. See How we start a new company and Phase-zero sites.

During that phase, the founder site is a sensible place to write about the problem being explored — in the founder's own voice, without making promises on behalf of a company that may not continue. If the company passes its checkpoints, it gets its own domain, its own source of truth and its own visibility, and the founder site links to it in context. If it stops, the founder's writing about the problem still stands as honest work, and nothing on the group site needs to be unwound. See Continue, stop or scale.

This sequencing protects everyone. The company is not launched on the back of borrowed attention before it is ready. The founder's credibility is not tied to claims about a product that does not exist yet. And the group site only lists companies the group actually operates.

Common mistakes with founder sites

1. Turning the personal site into a portfolio directory. A grid of company logos with no personal content says little about the person.
2. Sitewide keyword links. Footers and sidebars full of company links with keyword anchors.
3. Inconsistent names and descriptions. A different job title, spelling or company list on every profile.
4. Confusing a founder-named company with the founder. Especially where domains are similar.
5. Neglect. A founder site last updated years ago can do more harm than none, because it becomes the authoritative-looking source for outdated facts.
6. Borrowed authority. Claims, logos or figures that the founder cannot substantiate.

A checklist for founders running several ventures

• Give each founder one personal site on a domain they control, with a plain statement of who they are near the top.
• Define the distinct jobs of the founder site, the group site and each company site, and keep them distinct.
• Where a company carries a founder's name, record which domain is which and say so on both sites.
• Link contextually: once, in relevant content, with plain names as anchor text; never sitewide.
• Use consistent Person markup with sameAs links, and have the group's Organization markup point to each founder's site.
• Tag cross-links with a consistent referral convention, and keep analytics and email lists separate per site.
• Review the founder sites at least as often as company sites so the facts stay current.

Summary

Founder authority sites give the people behind a group a stable home for their own work and voice. Uğur Keser's ugurkeser.art and Sinem Keser's sinemkeser.com.tr each present the founder's own work and perspective, describe their relationship to Oryvelon and its companies briefly and accurately, and link to them only where the content genuinely calls for it. The group site names both founders and points to their sites in its structured data; companies earn their own visibility on their own domains; and data, analytics and email lists stay separate throughout. The result is a clear, consistent picture of who is behind what, for readers and for machines.

Questions and answers

What is a founder authority site?

A founder authority site is a personal website where a founder publishes their own work, experience and perspective under their own name. It builds credibility for the person and, in context, for the organisations they lead.

What are Oryvelon's founder sites?

Uğur Keser's site is ugurkeser.art and Sinem Keser's site is sinemkeser.com.tr. Both founders are named on oryvelon.com, and Oryvelon's structured data links each founder to their own site.

Is sinemkeser.com.tr the same as Sinem Keser Beauty Academy?

No. sinemkeser.com.tr is Sinem Keser's personal founder site, while Sinem Keser Beauty Academy is an Oryvelon company with its own website at sinemkeser.com.

Published by Oryvelon, a digital company builder · About the group · Our companies · More in Growth, Search & Measurement

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