About
Composer and growth strategist building systems for founders, creators, and independent operators.
I'm Murat Esmer - a senior growth strategist and independent musician based between the UK and Turkey. For the past 15+ years I've helped digital products grow from first user to millions, managing multi-million dollar marketing budgets while building lean teams across 11 languages.
In parallel, I've spent nearly two decades composing and releasing albums, and more recently curating The Sound Vault, a human-led music discovery project. My work now lives at the intersection of growth strategy, music curation, and independent product building.
Three Pillars
What I'm Building Around
Business & Growth
I work with founders and teams as a fractional growth partner - combining strategy, experimentation, and systems thinking to grow products without burning people out. I care less about hacks, more about building repeatable engines.
Music & Sound
I compose ambient, cinematic, and downtempo music, and I've released a full 18-year discography that's now streaming in one place. My latest work, Yakin, revisits older pieces with piano and strings - a story about getting closer again after years of distance.
Systems, Habits & Tools
I run interconnected projects like Habitist, The Sound Vault, and other small experiments at the edge of growth, creativity, and better habits. Each one is a live lab for testing how systems can quietly change how we work and live.
Philosophy
How These Worlds Connect
I don't separate business, music, and technology - I use them together.
Growth thinking helps me release music and projects in a way people can actually discover.
Musical thinking helps me design products, content, and brands with rhythm, pacing, and emotion.
Technology gives me leverage to do all of this as a mostly solo operator.
The result is an integrated practice: one life, multiple outputs, same underlying system.
Selected Work
Selected Work & Press
Ars Media - Growth Consulting
Led growth for fintech, travel and consumer products, including scaling one product from 0 to 1M+ users and managing $10M+ annual performance budgets.
The Sound Vault - Human Curation In An Algorithmic World
Built a multi-genre music discovery newsletter and archive that passed 1,000+ followers, ~4K monthly views and ~30% open rates through slow, human-first curation.
Habitist, SeoAI, Dobucketlist and other ventures
A family of tools around habits, SEO and goal execution - all built as live experiments in systems, automation and long-term thinking.
Press & Interviews
"The Sound Vault Takes a Hybrid AI and Human Approach to Music Discovery"
In-depth interview on Hypebot about my philosophy around human curation and AI-assisted workflows.
Purpose
Why I Build
A few years ago I realized I was carrying too much stuck momentum: unfinished ideas, scattered projects, and a quiet regret of not using my full capacity. Since then I've been slowly rebuilding my life around clearer systems, fewer but deeper projects, and more honest work in public.
I'm not trying to optimize everything. I'm trying to build things that age well - albums, products, communities, and ideas that still make sense years from now.
If my work does its job, it helps someone else move a little closer to who they want to become, with a bit more peace and a bit less noise.
Voices
Recommendations
I've been lucky to work with people who were willing to put their names behind my work. Here are a few excerpts from public LinkedIn recommendations (full list on my profile).
"Murat was a fantastic person to work with… His wonderful work flow, skills, knowledge and understanding of change requests made the project a dream."
- Mustafa Velioglu, Engineering Manager, via LinkedIn
"Ability to execute and deliver is what sets Murat apart from others. He is very methodical and effective in prototyping abstract ideas and converting them into working solutions."
- Sotos Sarmpezoudis, Founder, via LinkedIn
If you want to collaborate, listen, or compare notes, you can reach me at the edges of these three worlds: growth, music, and systems.
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