Free is a pleasing price until it starts teaching expensive habits. In 2016, Gercek Karakus and his colleagues at Raklet received $500,000 in Microsoft Azure sponsorship. Two years later, their monthly server costs had climbed above $20,000. A generous cushion had become a countdown. Karakus eventually described the episode in public, giving his account the sort of headline that a sponsor probably does not frame for the office.
That is a useful place to meet him. The founder and CEO of Raklet works in membership software, a business concerned with the unglamorous mechanics of belonging: records, reminders, dues, tickets. His career has moved through design, front-end engineering and company building. The interesting moments arrive when those jobs collide, when the person making a product must also work out how to keep it affordable.
There is plenty of personality in the details. A presentation about landing pages. An alumni association with an administrative headache. A founder asking strangers how to hire a marketer. Taken together, they describe an education that keeps escaping the engineering department.
A designer gets interested in the machinery
Karakus studied at Boğaziçi University from 2004 to 2008, graduating in information systems engineering. He began his career in design and went on to work at Six Apart, where his responsibilities crossed information architecture, graphics and front-end development. The job put the arrangement of information and the code that delivered it in the same pair of hands.
He also co-founded the social search engine Kimburda.com in 2010 and launched FriendStream.TV through StartupBus in 2011. FriendStream gathered videos from social feeds into a viewing channel. It belonged to that particular internet moment when friends were becoming distributors and the resulting abundance needed an editor, or at least a useful filter.
At Redbeacon, he worked in user experience. His public slide decks offer another view of that period: talks on front-end practice, application UX and building a landing page with Bootstrap. These are practical subjects. A landing page has to make a promise legible before its visitor loses interest. An interface has to turn that promise into something a person can actually do.
Those presentation subjects also suggest a useful way to read the later business. In interface design, a visitor brings a task and a limited supply of patience. A member trying to renew, an administrator trying to send a message and a founder trying to understand an invoice all need the next action to be clear. The jobs changed. The recurring challenge was to arrange complicated information so that somebody could put it to use.
His own compact description is “Builder at heart.” It fits a career spent moving between the visible surface and the machinery behind it.
The alumni association had a software problem
Raklet’s beginnings were tied to Gönen Eren’s work with the Galatasaray University alumni association. A system developed for the association attracted attention from other organizations. Their requests helped turn an internal solution into a commercial product after roughly eighteen months of development.
That origin matters because an alumni association is an unforgiving test of useful software. The idea of community sounds warm; the administration can involve tracking people, collecting money and making sure the right announcement reaches the right person. A reunion is considerably less romantic when its organizer is reconciling another spreadsheet.
Karakus joined Eren in building a business around those needs. By January 2016, Raklet was being used by more than fifty organizations and held over 100,000 member records. Those are early figures, belonging to that moment in the company’s life. They show a product already carrying other people’s operational responsibilities.
The work also gave Karakus a different design problem. An attractive interface was only part of the assignment. Membership records, messages and payments needed to cooperate. Every handoff between separate tools created another opportunity for work to be repeated. Raklet’s proposition was to bring those tasks together.
Three connected jobs behind the familiar word “community.”
Berlin supplied a runway. It also supplied a lesson.
In 2016, Raklet entered Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Berlin and then Techstars Berlin. The support included $500,000 in Azure credits and $120,000 in seed funding through Techstars. Credits and cash served different purposes: one covered eligible infrastructure use; the other was financing for the company.
For an engineering team, abundant infrastructure can make the next upgrade easy to justify. Karakus later reported that Raklet reduced its monthly cloud costs to about $4,000 after the bill had passed $20,000. His August 2018 account set a further goal of $1,000 a month. The goal remained a goal in that account.
When “free” has a running meter
Historical server costs reported by Karakus. Bars use $20,000 as the comparison baseline; the original bill exceeded it.
The broader lesson is easy to recognize. A subsidy can postpone the moment when a company has to confront the true cost of its choices. “Free” offers no helpful warning when the next increment of convenience becomes a habit.
Even the founder asks the forum
A smaller episode from 2018 shows him working through another decision. Karakus went to the Discourse community with a question about integrating its discussion software into Raklet. He had used Discourse through Techstars Connect and wanted to bring those capabilities to customers.
He described what Raklet already did: contact management, email and SMS, payments and a private social network. Members could find one another, send direct messages and browse job boards. Discussion boards and commenting posed an additional challenge. The team had limited resources and could not build everything itself.
His questions were specific. Could organizations have separate discussion spaces? How should authentication work? Would each client need its own installation? He was open to consultants and to a hosted service. The exchange reads like a working session, complete with an appreciative reply and a willingness to consider someone else’s expertise.
There is a pleasing modesty in that. An all-in-one product still has to decide which things belong inside its own codebase. The person selling integration was also doing the ordinary work of asking how to integrate.
The product person needs a marketing person
By September 2021, Karakus reported that Raklet had reached $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue after roughly five years of bootstrapping. He also reported a problem that additional code would have struggled to solve: he needed someone to take charge of marketing.
He had tried paid campaigns, blog posts and cold email, and had spoken with hundreds of prospects. He had looked for help on AngelList, LinkedIn and Upwork. The company’s budget constrained what it could offer. He wanted a teammate who would take responsibility for growth.
“I’m more of a product/engineering guy,” he wrote. It is a useful admission in a field where founders are often expected to sound equally fluent in every department. Here was a technical founder making the limits of his own experience part of the hiring brief.
The milestone and the difficulty belong together. Recurring revenue gave the company room to consider another hire; finding that hire remained work. A functioning product did not automatically supply a functioning marketing team. His post ended by asking other founders how they had found their first marketing expert.
“I’m more of a product/engineering guy”
Gercek Karakus, writing about hiring for growth, 2021
Building the routes to customers
There had already been experiments. In July 2020, Karakus announced Raklet’s affiliate program, offering partners a recurring 30 percent commission while referred customers remained active. In the comments, he explained that the team had built the system itself. An affiliate identifier connected each customer to a partner; a monthly script calculated earnings; operations handled payouts.
It is a neat miniature of the business. A commercial incentive had become a small piece of software, with a human process at the end. The founder could explain both the offer and the mechanism underneath it.
In August 2019, he had also announced a TechSoup partnership providing discounted access for nonprofits across a range of countries. The list included markets in Europe, Asia, North America and Oceania. That route to customers reflected the organizations Raklet was trying to serve: groups for which a useful tool also had to fit a limited budget.
Distribution, in these examples, involved more than finding an audience. It required arranging the terms on which other people could recommend, purchase and keep using the product.
A company measured in years together
Raklet describes a small, remote team that prefers asynchronous communication to repeated meetings. Karakus’s recommendation for engineer Zafer Çalışkan gives that arrangement a human timescale. Çalışkan had joined as a student intern and, by the time of the recommendation, had spent almost eight years with the company.
Karakus traced his colleague’s progress from quality assurance and automated testing into backend and front-end development. He praised ownership and concern for the result. The duration received a lighter treatment: almost eight years was “basically a lifetime in tech.”
It is an affectionate observation with a practical point behind it. An engineer who has grown through a product’s testing and application code carries experience that a hiring announcement cannot conjure overnight. The recommendation makes room for the colleague’s development alongside the company’s needs.
In the first quarter of 2024, Raklet received recognition across Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice reports in categories including membership, association and club management. These are the categories its early administrative problem has grown to occupy. Karakus continues to write about community operations and the software supporting them.
The work has a recurring shape: make information easier to use, make the economics work, and ask for help when the problem changes. For Karakus, an alumni database, a cloud bill and a marketing vacancy have all belonged to the same education. Belonging may be a human instinct. Somebody still has to make the renewal reminder arrive.