ilert Founder Birol Yildiz: "One Year Without Salary Was Our First Milestone"
Happy Bootstrapping Newsletter - Volume #14
Birol Yildiz left his well-paid job as Chief Product Owner at Rewe Digital in 2019 – after a car accident that opened his eyes. Today, he leads the Cologne-based SaaS company ilert as CEO with almost 20 employees and a four-digit customer base in Europe and North America. What's special: ilert is fully bootstrapped and highly profitable.
This is a summary of Episode 125 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).
The Founding Story: From Side Project to Full-Time Startup
The roots of ilert go back to 2011, when Birol founded the company right after his computer science studies. The idea emerged from his master's thesis on context-aware notification systems. "My realization was that even the mundane problem – if there's an issue in Nagios and I want to receive an SMS – was unsolved," he explains.
After 18 months, ilert became a side project as Birol wanted to gain professional experience. It wasn't until 2019/2020 that he really took off with two co-founders he had met at Rewe Digital. The turning point was a car accident: "That moment when the airbags deploy, when there's smoke in the car – that was the moment I paused and said, you just put your family in danger to be on time for a meeting."
The Product and Business Model
ilert solves a critical problem of digital transformation: 24/7 availability of IT services. "We help companies become responsive to incidents," Birol summarizes. The platform orchestrates incident management, from alerting through ChatOps to automatic post-mortems with AI support.
The business model is based on a freemium approach with four pricing tiers. The free plan supports up to five users, the Pro plan starts at €19 monthly, Scale at €39. Enterprise customers pay individual prices. "Our Enterprise deals are naturally much larger in terms of revenue than our self-service plans," Birol explains without naming specific figures.
Particularly impressive: ilert won IKEA as a customer with over 2,000 users in direct competition against Pager Duty and Opsgenie. "That was probably one of our fastest Enterprise deals," the founder reports proudly.
Marketing and Bootstrapping Challenges
In the early days, the team relied on aggressive cold outreach: "I basically sent a lot of emails in a short time under my name – 10,000, not just a few hundred." Today, ilert focuses on content marketing, performance marketing, and integration partnerships with over 100 tools.
Webinars have proven particularly effective. "From my perspective, a webinar is successful even if only 10 people attend," Birol explains. "The comparison for me is: How long does it take to speak with 5 people you've never talked to before?"
The biggest challenge was the first year without salaries. "We gave ourselves one year. If we could pay ourselves salaries after one year, we'd continue." The team survived this period through drastic salary cuts of about 50 percent.
Technology and Future
Technically, ilert uses Java in the backend, React in the frontend, and AWS services. The architecture is deliberately redundant – even with a separate system that monitors ilert itself. "Even if our web app isn't available, we can still alert you," Birol assures.
Key Learnings
Birol shares his success factors for bootstrapping founders:
Build a strong team: "If I were to start again, I would always found with a team"
Mental state: "How much do you believe in your own success? Are you good enough for yourself?"
Work-life balance: Three pillars are crucial – productivity, activity (sports), and social harmony
Maintain focus: Don't get distracted by competitors or investor inquiries
Customer orientation: Use "very honest feedback from small teams" for product development
With this strategy, ilert has successfully positioned itself against American market leaders and proves that European SaaS companies can compete internationally even without venture capital.
Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys. Over the years, I've connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.