The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 3

Onur Alp Soner, Countly

Open-Source SaaS to 7-Figure ARR With Zero Sales Calls

Onur was working as a C++ developer at Huawei in 2013 when he noticed there was no good open-source alternative for mobile analytics. He started building Countly as a side project, hosting the code on SourceForge before GitHub was the default. There was no validation phase. No customer interviews. No landing page test. Onur just started building and put the open-source SaaS code out there. It didn't start with a business plan - it started with curiosity and a gap in the market. Then something unexpected happened. Intel found Countly's open-source code and reached out asking for an enterprise version - before one even existed. That pattern repeated. Large companies would evaluate the free version, realize they needed support and compliance features, and ask to buy something that didn't exist yet. The open-source SaaS was being pulled into the enterprise market by its own users. A blog post about leaving his comfort zone as a C++ developer and learning Node.js hit the front page of Hacker News. That single piece of content drove a wave of attention that brought more enterprise buyers to their door. All without a single outbound sales call. But the journey wasn't smooth. Countly's first attempt at a SaaS product - Countly Cloud - failed. It looked identical to Mixpanel and Google Analytics with no clear differentiator. It hit a revenue ceiling and couldn't grow. Instead of pushing harder, Onur killed it and refocused on the enterprise model that was actually working. When they tried SaaS again with Countly Flex, they built it differently. Each customer gets a dedicated server in their chosen region, turning privacy from a marketing claim into technical architecture. That open-source SaaS differentiation gave Countly a reason to exist alongside much larger competitors. The hardest chapter came when a co-founder dispute that had been building silently for four years finally erupted. The breakup took eight months and nearly destroyed the company. Neither founder fully controlled the business during that period, and the tension paralyzed the entire team. Twelve years in, Countly is profitable, growing, and still bootstrapped. Onur believes the patience that comes from not having VC pressure is what allowed them to survive the failed product, the co-founder split, and the slow grind of enterprise sales.

Kyle Hanslovan, Huntress

Scaling SaaS From $0 to 8 Figures Without a Single Ad

Kyle Hanslovan is the co-founder and CEO of Huntress, a cybersecurity platform that helps businesses protect themselves against hackers and cyber threats. Before starting Huntress, Kyle was a hacker for the US government and NSA - not the Hollywood version, but as he puts it, "the real life pasty version behind a keyboard." In 2015, he spotted a huge opportunity. The big companies had fancy security teams, but smaller businesses were left wide open to attacks because they couldn't afford that kind of protection. Kyle saw a way to deliver his expertise at the price of a product. Getting those first customers was painful. He made over a hundred calls, many to businesses so small they didn't even have an IT department. His trusted network was too polite to give him honest feedback. The breakthrough came when he started talking to complete strangers who owed him nothing - they told him directly what was wrong with his pitch and his approach. It took nearly a year to land his first three customers. Two of them actually paid. The third one, as Kyle laughs about now, "used my free trial for like seven years before they finally paid me." The first product was incredibly minimal - just an installer that flagged security issues via email. No dashboard, no automation. The founders were doing all the security analysis by hand. But customers didn't care how the sausage was made. They cared about the result. Beyond those first customers, Kyle started scaling SaaS growth without spending a dollar on advertising. His secret weapon was leading with education - showing prospects what hackers were actually doing instead of pushing a sales pitch. He found "watering holes" where IT outsourcers gathered at trade shows and peer groups, then pitched to 20 people at a time instead of one. Things got tough along the way. Multiple seed rounds fell through, investors walked away, and Kyle and his co-founders weren't taking home a paycheck for years. The equity dilution got so painful that they nearly sold the company for $30M. But they stuck it out, took a bridge round from early investors, and went from $1.5M to $5M ARR in a single year. Today, after years of scaling SaaS revenue by doubling year after year, Huntress generates about $120M in ARR, has raised over $300M in funding, and has grown to a team of nearly 500 remote employees with a valuation close to $2 billion. Kyle's journey from bootstrapping to scaling SaaS at this level holds lessons about patience, equity, hiring, and leading with value over sales pitches.