
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.






















