Countly: Building a Privacy-First SaaS Without VC Funding – with Onur Alp Soner [437]

[00:00:00] Omer: Onur, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Onur: Great to be here, Omer.

[00:00:02] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:07] Onur: I do actually, and we can do a full podcast about just this quote. You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. So this is a quote by Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystic.

The way I interpret this for business is wisdom, purpose, and clarity. They're not out there, they're wit you, right? So I think we have to look more within ourselves.

[00:00:35] Omer: I love those deep quotes. You're right. We could talk about that for hours. Probably not as intelligently as Rumi, all right.

So tell us about currently what does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:46] Onur: So Countly is a privacy first digital analytics and customer experience platform. So we help companies capture ,analyze and act on first party data across mobile, web, desktop connected devices without relying on third party tracking or giving up the control of their data.

I guess the biggest differentiator would be the focus on privacy, right? We have been privacy focused since the beginning 12 years ago. And the way we see it is in order for the companies to, to really not only value the privacy of their users, but the importance of data is accelerating even further with the introduction of AI and everything else, right?

So we want companies to own that data, not give it away to third parties, or risk losing the data being stuck in those third party platforms.

[00:01:42] Omer: And give us a sense of some of the customers that you have. I know you've got some major brands using Countly.

[00:01:49] Onur: Yeah, of course. So currently has three editions, we actually have an open source version currently light.

We have a self-serve SaaS version called Countly Flex, and we have our flagship product, currently enterprise. So throughout the ecosystem we are serving thousands of small and big companies. But I guess on the count, the enterprise side we have some great names for example, BMW Coca-Cola, AWS Roche, like we have worked with really large organizations throughout, the history of the company

[00:02:23] Omer: And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team?

[00:02:28] Onur: So we are a 40% team. So we are from 12 countries at the moment.

So we are a seven figure ARR business. We are fully bootstrapped didn't raise any VC money so far and not really thinking of doing so. Going further.

Yeah.

[00:02:48] Omer: Great. So the business was founded 2013. Where did the idea come from? What were you doing at the time?

[00:02:56] Onur: Actually I was working in Huawei and actually I was working not with my co-founders but we got connected somehow.

And there was, this idea of building itself hosted mobile analytics platform. We were working in large companies, right? So I guess it was apparent. The privacy aspect of data being exploited too much, and we couldn't wrap our heads around, okay, how do companies agree to giving away their data to these large companies, to these third parties?

This can't be the future, right? So the future should be like. These companies should own the data. And that's actually the core reason why we started currently and why we still believe in the same thing, right? So companies should own their own data.

[00:03:44] Omer: Okay, so you got the idea, that there's a potential opportunity, but how did you go out and validate the idea?

Did you start building something internally at the time, or was this more about let's do some market research and let's figure out if this really is a valid concern?

[00:04:00] Onur: I guess we just jumped into it. Omer. So we, there wasn't much of a validation I. So we love the idea.

Okay, let's just build this and see the reaction of course the count that we are talking about 12 years ago, we are talking about a very basic self hostable analytics platform that just works for iOS and Android applications. That's it, right? I'm a pretty simple MVP but it became quite popular actually back in the day.

There is still source forge. I don't, I'm sure the sites we weren't using GitHub back in the day or even Git for that for that reason, we were using SPN the older ones in the audience will remember. But essentially it became quite popular quite quickly, right?

We weren't really expecting that demand. And actually we always had the plan of next to the open source version. We will have an enterprise edition without being able to do that. The first customer started asking for an enterprise edition with more features, support, hands-on dedicated teams for them. So I guess the market pulled the product from us in the very beginning. Things aren't that easy right now, but 12 years ago that was the story.

[00:05:13] Omer: Okay. Let's take a quick breather here. I. Are you struggling to bring your SaaS idea to life without a technical co-founder?

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Okay, so you decided to build this open source version and just put it out there. How long did it take you to, to ship something and get it in the hands of potential users. And once it was out there, how long did it take for these enterprise type requirements to start showing up?

[00:06:22] Onur: I guess from idea to shipping the first version? I think somewhere six months or so, like the very first, like MEP type of version. I think it took six months or so. But the enterprise version probably took another six months. So in a year we had an open source version.

There wasn't much of a difference between open source and enterprise, actually enterprise it's just like one additional feature and support on top of the open source edition of Countly. Yeah.

[00:06:53] Omer: And were you guys still working full time? Was this like evenings and weekends thing or did once, once you'd started building it you decided, Hey, there's enterprise opportunity.

Let's jump in and go full time.

[00:07:06] Onur: In the very beginning yeah, it was, it started as a weekends and after work sort of thing for a little bit, right? But then I immediately jumped into it. So I quit my job. I had, a little bit of money. So I, like I. Okay. I'm very young.

There's nothing to lose really. Let me just try this out. If it doesn't work, like I will just go back to my corporate job for that matter. My, my co-founders had a little bit more commitments than I did, so they didn't immediately quit their jobs. So they stayed a little bit, but, still supporting me and everything.

But yeah, like I I guess chose to just jump into it immediately given the age advantage back in the day.

[00:07:46] Omer: Yeah. Okay, great. So putting the open source version out there on Source Forge. That was a great distribution platform at the time that, people are discovering this and everyone's downloading it and starting to use it.

How did the enterprise opportunity, because you said it was your intention to ultimately build an enterprise version of this anyway, that's what you had been thinking. But those enterprise customers started turning up how did that happen and who were some of those initial, enterprise companies that you started having these discussions with?

[00:08:26] Onur: Great question. After launching the open source version I guess we, we tried to do a little bit of like content marketing. I remember I had an, a blog post that I sent to Hacker News and it got to the first page and there was a lot of attention. It was about why I chose the technologies.

I chose and not some other technologies back in the day. So talking about the getting out of comfort zone and trying, new stuff for your project. And I guess not only that, but also the overall I. And we were pretty serious on writing proper documentation. We had, a block, so to speak, so like that content area.

So I guess all of that plus the open source perspective contributed to the, these large companies finding us themselves, right? So we didn't really go to any large company ourselves. We were lucky, I guess one of the first paid customers we had paying customers was Intel, right? And they found us through the open source version, right?

Because they had this develop developer platform and they were looking to analytics into that platform they came okay guys, this is great, but we need more features. We have a enterprise version of this. We didn't actually at the time we had the plan, right? So it was in the works, but the product wasn't really available.

So I guess, the first 1, 2, 3 customers reached out themselves and there wasn't even a product to sell yet.

[00:09:52] Omer: So I'm curious because at that point the product wasn't doing a lot right? Because you'd only been spending about six months part-time. Building this, and for some of these larger companies to come along, I think there's often this tendency to just say, let's build this in-house.

We can do this ourselves. And so why do you think that there was enough interest for them to reach out to you? And work with you to get more features into this versus trying to just go off and build something in-house?

[00:10:24] Onur: I think, sure had certain companies insisting to build in-house after having conversations with us, but I will say the smarter ones because especially mobile analytics. Very complicated, right? So unlike web for web, you have a JavaScript SDK, and it's, everything is JavaScript based, right? So you're, it's not platform dependent. It's JavaScript, it's cross-platform. It works in every browser, but with mobile for every platform.

You need to have an SDK specifically created for that platform. So I guess the enterprises that know what they are doing, they understood very well this challenge, right? So we can't possibly do an Android, SDK and iOS, SDK then like these other frameworks started to, to pop up react native, flatter there are a lot of different tools and platforms and frameworks to, to build these applications first. I guess that was an early win for us. We were mobile first, right? So we had those SDKs ready. They were fully open source, by the way, they were MIT license. We wanted the companies to see what we are capable of under the hood, right? Okay. Just look at the SDK, what we've done, how we are maintaining it.

It's fully transparent and, visible on, on GitHub. So yeah, I, I will say that's like that was the biggest reason they would choose us versus build. But yeah, I guess this is still a thing. Omer, after 12 years and us spending millions of dollars on building currently, we still get that reaction time to time.

Why? Why? I can just build this myself. No one can doesn't matter, like the size of a company, if this is not your primary focus, there are like too many individuals, bits and pieces that you don't know, right? So you, and you cannot really know without fully focusing on analytics.

[00:12:16] Omer: Now you mentioned Intel being one of your first customers on the one hand, that's amazing.

To be able to attract a customer like that. But as we know, when you are early stages of a startup, your bootstrap, your small team, having a big customer turn up with requirements can also become a nightmare very quickly. So what happened with you guys and working with them?

[00:12:45] Onur: That's exactly what happened actually. Omer. They came in with high expectation, not just Intel, right? Any problem, all of the first 10 customers, they came with the same expectations, like high expectations, brought customization demands and a pace that didn't really match our scale. So at this point we are talking about a team of three, four max.

Of course we couldn't really say no. Because imagine okay, you took the risk of quitting your job. You have this software, and then Intel comes in saying, I want to pay you guys, right? So I, I didn't have that business mentality really. Like I, I made developer by background myself. We couldn't say no, right?

So we accepted most of those things. We didn't get paid enough. Now, like thinking about, all the stuff we did for them. But I guess after the first 10 or so mistakes, let's put it that way we. We learned to stand our ground, right? Holding firm to a product vision, right?

So if I'm, obviously this doesn't mean we didn't listen to the customers, we listened to them, but there was a larger vision and if what we are hearing doesn't really align in any way with that vision. We wouldn't do it. And we explained or tried to explain to the customers and they understood.

So I think that worked pretty well, and that's what we do right now. So still in enterprise business customization is inevitable because in a way that's the value I. You bring to the table, like Google Analytics will not change their product for you or add an additional feature for you, most likely, but, we can make that happen.

And suddenly you become very important for that company. We still do that, but again not in the sense that we, I remember we used to do okay, we do analytics. Can you add push notifications? Sure. We are talking about an entire, business, not if it's small feature, right? No not anymore, luckily.

[00:14:47] Omer: Yeah, it's hard in the early days, right? Because you want, you've got an opportunity, you wanna delight those potential customers. You want to keep them around. And so it's tempting to say, okay, it's deep down. We know it's not on strategy, it's not part of the vision.

But. We could do it right?

[00:15:06] Onur: It's still not easy Omer, I would say, right? You have this big opportunity from this customer, they can't, you can't make this usable for other customers. And like still there is that, perspective, I would say. But yeah, early on I think everyone should be mindful of not overdoing it.

Sure. I'm not saying don't listen to your customer. They don't know, et cetera. Of course they know the market, they know what they need, et cetera. But those early day stuff can kill the company early on. So we were lucky, from several angles including not having VC money, right?

Because certain things took us longer to build properly. And I can't imagine a vc sticking with us for three years until we figured this out. And, we had that time.

[00:15:52] Omer: So at that point you had the open source version, which people could download and self-host. You had this enterprise version, which enterprises could, install in their own, behind their own firewalls or whatever.

How long did it take for you to get to those first 10 customers? I assume they were all enterprise customers and you mentioned that, hey, we did a lot of work for Intel and on and other people and in hindsight, we probably didn't get paid as much as we should have for the value we provided.

How, what did you learn from that and what did you do differently with the next few customers that, that came along? I guess

[00:16:28] Onur: How long did it take? We are talking about 12 years ago. Over my, my, my memory is a little bit not super clear, but I think I would say the first 10 might have actually took like.

One year to close, right? Because one problem with enterprise software is also the sales cycle, right? There's contracts to review read. I guess we didn't even have a contract there as far as I remember when Intel reached out, right? Like suddenly there's panic. Okay. Let's find a lawyer, prepare a contract.

How can we afford the lawyer? No money okay, figure something out, et cetera. So we also delayed, like we weren't ready for that sales cycle to begin with, but also, of course, large companies have their own processes, had to go through all of them. So I think a fair estimate would be a full year to close the first 10.

So I think what we have learned from the first 10 is definitely that expectation management and charging for not only the software, right? So I guess that's the biggest learning for me. As a developer, like a technical person. I guess there is this tendency to think about what you're selling is just the product, right?

Just the software. But in these kind of enterprise contexts, you are selling the knowhow experience and you know the contributions you are making to the strategy of the company on the other side, right? In some occasions, this is actually more valuable than the software you are selling. So I think companies like Intel made us realize this a little bit better.

That's why we still, to this day, we don't have public pricing for Enterprise Edition. And the reason is we want to understand the situation as much as possible, right? How much help do you need from us? Do we need to be there handholding you or you already have an analytics culture, you know what to do and what you're after is just the software, right?

There's a big difference between the two. I think that's. What we had to learn early on, because if we continued like that, we would be probably dead in a few months. Okay, there's not enough money. This is not really, great of course working with Intel and likes of Intel, but at the end of the day, this needs to grow and expand into other stuff and yeah.

That's how we evolved or what we learned at the end of the day.

[00:18:54] Omer: And were these first 10 customers or inbound? Was it just from a combination of either discovering the open source or by coming across the content that you were publishing, like the hack and use example you gave?

[00:19:07] Onur: Yeah, exactly. To this day we will probably talk about this later on.

I don't think we are great at outbound still. So inbound, I guess that stuck, that, that stuck with us. Okay, we are inbound, we are organic, of course being bootstrap has this, has its limitations and certain way of thinking. 12 years is a very long duration. So we had to really internalize the idea of whatever we do needs to be.

Having an ROI like immediately, like we don't have two years to, collected the results of a marketing campaign or a cult outreach. So I guess, we had our mistakes of course, in terms of outbound but inbound was the primary thing then. And even now.

[00:19:51] Omer: And the content stuff, you the Hacker News example was one the blog post that you mentioned, I know you were writing content, publishing content and just sharing.

What you were learning when I talk to founders who are in those early stages, one of the things they often struggle with is they don't know what to write about. They don't think it's particularly useful, so they're like, why bother? And often they, it almost feels like there's some overthinking about who, who am I trying to write to?

Who's the buyer? How do I reach them? All of this stuff. And you can almost get a lot of analysis paralysis and end up doing nothing. And it sounded like you were taking a slightly more simplified approach, which was let's just share what we are learning along the way. And hopefully somebody will find it useful.

Am have I, am I oversimplifying that or was there some more thought about target audience and that stuff?

[00:20:47] Onur: Definitely. So I think yes, we weren't really overthinking about it. But if I started now, I would also, maybe go into that overthinking route right now. Like social media and everything is a different game than, compared to 12 years ago.

So we should always, keep that in mind. But even now. Okay, like I, I also go into this time to time, like I should, I share things on LinkedIn, how frequently? Whatever. Just don't think about it, right? So something maybe everyone knows about it doesn't matter.

Just go at it, share it, write an article. Don't make AI write your blog posts or just write as much as you can with what you know. That's pretty much what we did. I was what, 20 something years old at the time, I didn't really know much. So I only had three years of prior work experience.

And the first thing we wrote was actually a proper documentation, right? Just talking about the product. Not like technically as in, okay, this is. But this dropdown does, but rather if you are a product person, this is how you can use this feature for like our documentation was very broad, not only covering, okay, these are the API endpoints or the ui.

And here is an explanation of the UI but rather if you come to count the and see the dashboards, what can you do here? How can it be useful for you? Basically wrote about everything we can think of and then the block. The one I mentioned about Hacker News, I'm not a particularly, especially at the time, I wasn't in any sort of expert in any of those technologies.

But the point of the post was getting out of your comfort zone. I was a C+ programmer back in the day and currently was built on node js and MongoDB. And before that, I guess I tried Python and some other stuff. And I wrote about okay, I'm not comfortable with any of those stuff, but it's okay.

So that was the post, right? So there is almost always a unique aspect of these founder stories. You face something, there's an obstacle, right? There is something unique to you for sure. So don't try to be like those bigger influencers, I guess is a good way to think about it. You don't need to be famous from day one to three.

At some maybe a few months, maybe a few years. No one will care about you. At some point if you're doing the right stuff, yeah. People will notice what you do. I think that should be the thinking, but it's not, I guess it's easier said than done,

[00:23:16] Omer: I think a useful tip that, that I came across was that when people are reluctant to write because they don't feel like they're an expert.

Is maybe just reframe it and think about, if this was, if you were writing for yourself one year ago, what do you wish you could teach yourself? What's the thing that might help you? That's probably useful enough, right? Without feeling like you have to come across like an expert.

[00:23:37] Onur: I mean with that thinking, I shouldn't be here in your podcast. So you had guests that had built like unicorns, right? Why am I speaking with you? Because like I have unique angles to share that probably they didn't, face or maybe it'll be useful to a specific person in the audience.

Same with writing. I just share whatever you can.

[00:23:58] Omer: Yeah, totally. Now. You also now have this you mentioned this SaaS version of the product the flex version of count lead. And you've been working on that for a couple of years now. You tried to build a SaaS version before and that failed originally.

Can you talk about that? What happened? Why did it not work out the first time?

[00:24:20] Onur: Yeah, of course. So actually. The first time was, very close to like I now question the decision, but after launching Enterprise Edition like couple of months later, we launched the SaaS version too, right?

So we didn't wait okay, SaaS won't pay thing, but rather we just meant, wanted to go full in, right? So enterprise, open source, and then SaaS version. The problem was first of all, small team. And distraction. So that's the biggest problem because here you have found a clear angle that's going to like product market fit direction very rapidly, which is like the enterprise and open source combo in the SaaS area.

Especially because we are talking about a privacy centric solution. We didn't really differentiate enough, right? So what is the difference of currently from Mixpanel, from Google Analytics? Nothing, right? So it's a shared environment. It's a, shared source service. There is no separation of data.

There is no security feature other than, the normal security sta security stuff. Everyone does like encryption and all that. Basically it quickly turned into, it started making money, right? So that part, not a huge amount, but we immediately had paying customers very quickly.

It got to a certain point, but then it couldn't pass that point, right? So we were stuck at some MRR and it never really went above that number. And the reason I think is again we were the small player in the market. We didn't really fully put much thought into building count the cloud.

It was called Countly Cloud back in the day, by the way.

[00:26:07] Omer: Creative name?

[00:26:09] Onur: Creative. Yeah, exactly. So we, we decided okay, this is not really aligned with this privacy perspective we are trying to pursue. And it, we can't really differentiate Countly with the cloud version right now.

So we killed it at that point to focus fully on enterprise and open source combination. Got it. And why we did it again maybe I can also talk about that one more. We wanted to do it again, right? Because with Enterprise Edition, there is always the problem of that kind of business model only works well if you're dealing with large. The customer doesn't need to be large per se, but the contract value needs to be large, right? Because we don't have thousands of enterprise customers, right? So it'll be in hundreds for any player in the market. But because, because of all the. After sales interaction, right?

Because of the way how closely you are supposed to work with the customer, it's on purpose built that way, right? So this will be a limited operation. But at the same time currently is a pretty capable product, especially now. Maybe not 12 years ago, but now you have analytics we have engagement capabilities, like you can show surveys or send push notifications, and all of this is in a single platform, so this is super valuable even for small companies.

So we were like, okay, we need to. Be able to give this to smaller organizations, right? So you don't need to be like a Fortune 500 to make use of these features. But at the same time, we wanted to preserve our privacy perspective. Thus this time we did it differently. So Flex is not like a traditional sauce where it's like a shared environment and everyone is using that shared singular database, but rather just like a cloud provider, when you go into Flex, you create your own currently server, right? So it's still a dedicated server. You choose the location, right? Okay, I want the server in Germany, Frankfurt. And we launch your server there and you start using your server that's dedicated only to you, right? So we basically preserve the story, right?

So this is still about privacy. We still want you to own. Your data and keep it in a location or region you want, et cetera. So that's why we want to go and try it again, right? Because we know clearly SaaS is a is a booming market. And we don't have anything there.

In that market. So we wanted to basically make account available for a larger audience, especially preserving our core values of privacy being, data ownership centric, et cetera.

[00:28:49] Omer: So it's not a true sort of multi-tenant type saaS but you're you're basically making it easier for people to self-host, right?

Because you're saying, the flex version rather than you taking the code and figuring all that stuff out. It's almost like being able to go to a digital ocean and just do a one click and it spins up something for you.

[00:29:09] Onur: Yeah exactly. Digital ocean was a big, inspiration actually. So the way how it, you know it's easy to launch a droplet and get started with WordPress, whatever. I guess same idea. We could have launched, in these marketplaces of cloud providers. But then we want to have a little bit more control over the whole setup. So it's not just a singular solution you launch, but rather there are a lot of things you can do within the flex ecosystem itself.

[00:29:36] Omer: Now I've seen other analytics products out there that also took about privacy. But they, when they're talking about privacy from like a different perspective we're not gonna use your data or Google might be using it with Google Analytics. But when you talk about privacy you are like being hardcore.

You're just saying, Hey it's gonna be a completely dedicated environment. It's your data, you control it, and so on. And so when you talked about doing this the first time and not being able to have a clear differentiator versus some of these other products that were out there, was this the one thing.

That you decided to get behind and did it resonate with the market like wa was it a matter of just, doubling down on privacy and creating that differentiator for the product this time.

[00:30:28] Onur: The topic of privacy Omer is a, is an interesting one because on one hand no one seems to care about it unless Google, Facebook, whatever does an oopsie about losing customer data. But most of the, at least back in the day 12 years ago, it's. Super. It was super different than how it is right now. It was like okay, privacy, like sure, like I don't really care, but tell me.

But now it's mostly regulation driven thinking, I would say. There are all these things like, GDPR in Europe, California Privacy Act like there are multiple different versions of this within the US in different states. States then, like Middle East has its own regulation.

Then, Turkey introduces a similar thing then China. So this quickly spread and it's a regulation driven thing, but I think especially in the last few years. The value is even more understood, right? Because it for a topic like, like ai, right? So I guess we, we owe that to ai. You need enormous amounts of structured data, right?

Because AI is not magic, right? So it needs to be trained. You need to have proper data for your, internal, external, whatever AI applications you're trying to develop. I think, apart from data privacy, the ownership became the important aspect, right? I guess this goes hands in hand.

The ownership, like me having direct access to my raw data or keeping it close to my AI model so that I can just feed whatever information comes into my model immediately in real time or, instead of trying to use the API of Google Analytics to fetch the data and then get limited by bandwidth. And not only that, but also the depth of information that you can collect in a tool like Google Analytics is pretty limited compared to not only us, but the wider product analytics market. So I think the demand for quality data really made the data ownership concept more and more important.

And as a side effect, customers or end users, they get to enjoy the privacy aspect. I can't really say customers or large companies care about privacy and that's why they self deploy. It has to be something in it for them. And that topic is right now data ownership, right?

So having direct access, unlimited access and control over, over the data.

[00:33:00] Omer: I wanna talk about, founders or co-founders you mentioned your two co-founders and so in, in the early days, very early days, there was like three of you, but once the dust settled and as you grew the business, it really was really just two of you who ran the business together and grew it.

And then we were talking earlier about a dispute between the two of you that almost killed the company. Can you talk about that?

[00:33:25] Onur: Yeah. So I guess, for us as the business grew, right? I guess we, this is quite common in, in every company, co-founder disputes, et cetera.

But for us, there's an added dimension currently is quite an old business, right? 12 years. That's not a very common thing to see it. Okay? 12-year-old startup. And we are still calling ourselves a startup. So I think over those years, I never believed in people when they told me like, okay, co-founder relationship is like a marriage.

Be careful who you start the company with. Not be careful, like that's a bad person, but rather you need to be really compatible with each other, right? Beyond what you initially imagine. So it's not just about okay, I know technical side, this guy knows sales side. We will be a great team.

Not really. It doesn't work that way. You need to be compatible in a personality manner as well. So the vision, I mean that comp compatibility is, I think, the most important thing in the long run, especially after five years, things start to get a little bit different. So you have been.

Together forever. It feels like forever. And you start to notice or pick up onto like these individual things you notice on the other side sort of thing. So I guess ultimately we started having different visions for the company and for ourselves. So this misalignment started to affect execution.

Decision making, like this tension, started becoming visible across the larger team, which is something, you would want as the last thing to happen, right? Because people look up to you like you're the founders of the company and you're fighting with each other. So that doesn't really work out.

Yeah, at some point I wish we handled the situation I guess cleanly it didn't end up clean, unfortunately. That unfortunately, like we, we broke up and I remained in the company. Of course I'm not talking about he's kicked out, didn't get anything, et cetera.

So of course there was, compensation and everything. But I. I wish I could have kept a relationship, right? So I guess if I look back and question, okay, how could I have kept the relationship, I think we waited too much to address the apparent issues, right? So we always thought okay, let's focus on building the product, the business.

But we didn't really build our relationship. We just, put under the rug all the problems, and then. After a very long period of time, they, those things come up right. And at that point we still tried to fix, but unfortunately it was too late to go back to where we were.

[00:36:09] Omer: When you look back now, how long do you feel this was going on? Y it's like when you're going through the process, you don't really maybe you have less awareness until it gets to a point where it gets really bad, and then maybe there's this three month period or six month period where things get intense.

But when you look back, you go, honestly, there was signs of this two years ago, three years ago, that there was something that was not working, but we tried to. As you said, like brush it onto the carpet and just move on.

[00:36:42] Onur: I think before the peak I would say things started like 4, 3, 4 years ago.

It already started to not be like the same relationship anymore, right? So I think, of course we ignore the signs but anything is a sign, right? So you have to remember okay, how, like you have to look into how are you really resolving the conflicts? For example, are you re really resolving them or are you just like someone you know.

Decides on the next step and you go with that person's decision and not talk about what the other person is thinking. So I guess we had many of those and like many other topics of course. But yeah, I think this is definitely not like a, okay, it immediately happened, kind of topic, right?

So I think the final stays are it doesn't take too long, right? So I would say for us it was maybe six months three months, three to six months. But yeah, like there is a four year history before those final moments.

[00:37:43] Omer: If you were back in that, back in those days, in the early stages, what were stages when you realized that there was some potential issue, or maybe somebody's listening to this who's in a similar situation right now that maybe things aren't quite working with their co-founder or co-founders and they're trying to ignore it.

The outcome might still be the same but if there was one thing maybe you could have done back then to. At least get to a resolution or closure faster. Is there anything that you would've done differently?

[00:38:19] Onur: Definitely I think I would have I think, I was more I guess I, I was sugarcoating things more.

Back in the day, I would say I sugarcoating, as in Okay. I'm sure he didn't think that way or, I'm sure he didn't mean that. So basically without speaking to the person I made my conclusions in the most positive way, right? That's how I continued essentially going forward. But I think I would recommend having those harder conversations.

As soon as you notice something is off don't wait for something to happen. That's already very bad stage. Like I can tell you that breakup period probably took eight months from my time. In terms of like emotionally not being able to work right? And I don't know whether we will be able to actually solve the problem, right?

So this could, that could have killed the company, right? Because at that point, okay, no one really owns the company, what happens? So I think initially addressing that it would've been better if we had those hard conversations. Even if we fought in those early signs of.

Conflict or misalignment, it would've been a better result. So I think basically have that, those crucial conversations very early on, right? Don't wait for anything significant to happen. Would be what I would change, I guess I, I apply to that, to everything right now, right? So even with the people I work, I try to be, to the point and concise when it comes to those critical conversations, because this is the same with every relationship or like any, team member you will have in the company.

Don't wait until that significant one event, just talk about the topic immediately.

[00:40:04] Omer: There's probably a lot more we could unpack. For the last 12 years of building this business. But I think this is probably a good point for us to wrap up. So let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you.

All right. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:40:24] Onur: I still remember the, to this date, a famous VC in San Francisco. So in the very beginning we were, speaking with some VCs to understand the market. He told me you have to do way more chest beating like a gorilla.

So he was, he talked me into okay, this is what we do in San Francisco, and that's one of the primary differences. Everyone here is a great marketer. They will talk about things that they don't even have yet and they will sell it to you and you have this great thing, but you don't talk about it enough.

Was, I think is it like a super unknown advice, not really. It's very obvious thing, but I still remember like the the gorilla reference and like how it really captures the way you should do it very properly.

[00:41:12] Omer: Yeah, and I think especially for like maybe founders in, in Europe or other.

Potential places where culturally it's not normal to do that kind of chest beating, right? But once you're in the US market, it's almost you almost come across as underselling yourself. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:41:35] Onur: Yeah, I think I would recommend Deep Work by, by Cal Newport Omer, right?

Not that I agree with every single word in the book, but I think focus is an aspect. We are, more and more forgetting, right? So we are all over the place. We want to do everything now, right? So we're not focusing on that one thing we should be really focusing about. And I think I usually work that way, but that book reminded me the importance of having a mentality around, really dedicating time to do your deep work, meaningful work versus the everyday tasks.

Not a very, deep read but I would still recommend to anyone in startup world, business or creative work. I think they'll find something they can relate to.

[00:42:21] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. I totally get that. I think that's a great book. And also I found that my natural mode is to be almost this ADHD mind, which tries to do like a hundred things in a day.

And the rare moments where I'm able to just say, I'm gonna focus on one thing in one day and just do something meaningful. It is rewarding to be able to do that, but it's also a very hard switch to make mentally if you are not wired to be able to do that. This is definitely great advice.

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:42:54] Onur: I would say resilience, Omer. So I guess it doesn't matter if you are the smartest person in the world you have the best products or you have the best team, it'll get tough, right? It'll then get better, then it'll get tougher.

Then it'll get even better, right? So this is. Inevitable. Even if you're open ai, this is the story, right? So it doesn't matter if you're a small startup or like a super large company. So I would say this journey is nothing to be afraid of, right? And I would do it all again. If, if I were if I was asked, okay, would you do it all again?

But you need to be ready to embrace all the ups and downs, right? So remember I think sure there is like the, okay, what's your exit strategy? And we can talk about that. But at the end of the day, exit is just one point. And this is a full journey that you're going through and it'll have ups and downs, but you are doing it for the journey.

You should be doing it for the journey and to go through it, you need to be really resilient. I think that's, that will be my one pick.

[00:44:02] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:44:06] Onur: I really I. Don't have one Omer, but I would say at least I try, like for me, what works best is I, even if it's small, I need to feel I accomplished something in that day and I need to go to bed with that feeling and wake up with something I will target that day.

So basically it's end to end filled with some accomplishments and something to do that's meaningful. So I try to keep at least one thing for the next day. And that's my win for the day. As long as I have that back to back, I'm productive of course I can't do it all the time, right?

So it is, it is not a hundred percent schedule. I can follow the moment. I don't have that anymore. Especially if you're the founder of the company, like whatever, you'll be direct into all sorts of different places in the company with, customer conversations and everything.

And those feel like productive things, but I would say usually they aren't contributing anything. So you just feel productive because you stayed in a meeting for an hour with this random person.

[00:45:18] Omer: What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:45:22] Onur: I won't tell you exactly, I might still do it, but I think I had before, before currently I had this idea for a game, right? And especially with the advancements in ai, that game would be super nice if done right now. With the introduction of AI. So I guess that would be my project. I even drew like some pixel art for that game, by the way.

It was that serious. I was almost, doing it and then, calmly happened. So yeah, that would be my, my pick.

[00:45:57] Omer: I'll keep a lookout for it.

[00:45:59] Onur: Yeah, I'll definitely let you know if I ever do that.

[00:46:03] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:46:07] Onur: Okay, so this I will hit you from a different angle for sure. So I think I have watched the entire Harry Potter series like 10 times. So I feel like that's like the movie series is like eight movies. And like basically I, I watch like 80 Harry Potter movies in that calculation. So I feel like that's like a reset button. I love the concept.

Like I just want to go back to that okay, we are starting again, like the whole story and everything. Yeah, I would say that's a fun fact.

[00:46:40] Omer: That is a fun fact. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:46:44] Onur: I should mention my kids at this point, right? Because if I jump into other things my wife might be listening and of course my wife, right?

So my wife and kids, and not just kids but I think I. If we go into okay, like a hobby kind of angle. I'm, I am really obsessed with mechanical wristwatches especially lately. I would say I'm into those like for several years now, but I think it's mesmerizing to learn and explore all the inner workings of such complicated watches.

And actually, when you think about it. They went through just like the tech business, right? So there was this introduction of the Quartz moment, like the first battery powered moment. And suddenly these brands, they need to reimagine what they do, right? Because what they do is not unique anymore, or it's not like they can only do this masterpiece, but some cheap manufacturer just puts this moment into a watch and it's more accurate than what you do as a hundred year old watch brand, right? So basically they need to readjust. So the way I think about is this feels like AI maybe, right? So okay, AI is the quiet movement. So how do you adapt to it? Do you live with it, integrate into what you do, or you try to do a different perspective?

[00:48:03] Omer: That's an interesting parallel. I never thought of it like that. Just what about AI?

[00:48:08] Onur: Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm trying to add everything. I think about the AI is part of it. I'm not really like a, an AI nerd in any way, but what we do, of course is very much into the topic of like data and like training and all this stuff.

So inevitably that topic is always there.

[00:48:26] Omer: Totally. Awesome. I wanna thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. If people want to check out count ly, they can go to countly.com. That's countly.com. And if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:48:41] Onur: I'm happy to give my email directly OAS so that's my initials, oas[at]count[dot]ly, right? So we actually got the countly.Com domain later on. So our first domain was count.Ly. So we still use that for emails. And also I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not super active on X, I'm, yeah, I'm not a social media person really for that sense. But yeah, I'm an email person still,

[00:49:08] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. It's like Cal Newport would be disappointed in you if you were spending too much time on social media, right? Yes. All right. Thank you so much for for joining me. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:49:21] Onur: Thank you very much, Omer. It was my pleasure. Thank you.

[00:49:24] Omer: Cheers.