Professional Role and Company Overview
Arda Bulut is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of HockeyStack, a SaaS analytics and attribution platform designed primarily for B2B SaaS companies. Founded in 2022 alongside co-founders Buğra Gündüz (CEO) and Emir Atlı (Chief Revenue Officer), the company operates out of San Francisco and Turkey, with approximately 11 employees as of early 2025. HockeyStack integrates marketing, revenue, and product data into a unified platform, enabling marketing teams to efficiently drive pipeline creation and sales teams to close deals faster by providing clear visibility on revenue attribution.
Education
Arda Bulut attended Brown University, which contributes to his strong technical foundation relevant to his CTO role.
Company Performance and Funding
HockeyStack has experienced rapid growth and industry recognition since its participation in Y Combinator's 2023 cohort. The company successfully raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners in January 2025. This capital injection aims to expand the platform's capabilities, particularly in AI-powered B2B analytics, scale the team, and enhance revenue and marketing insights.
As of the beginning of 2025, HockeyStack reached its 120th customer, including notable B2B brands such as Airme, Lavender, and Cosm. The company has also executed multiple six-figure deals in recent quarters, highlighting strong commercial traction and market validation.
Product Development Philosophy and Execution
As CTO, Arda Bulut has driven a customer-centric, iterative approach to product development. Key elements of his strategy include:
- Simplicity and ease of use: The product was originally conceived to address ease of implementation and user experience, reducing the need for customers to perform complex configurations. This remains a core principle, aiming to minimize "brain calories" spent by users.
- Rapid iteration with a minimal viable product (MVP) mindset: Arda emphasizes launching simple, functional prototypes that directly address core customer pain points—showing early versions to users and iterating based on feedback rather than building complex features upfront.
- Data unification and revenue attribution: A pivotal product evolution focused on attributing revenue back to specific marketing activities, particularly blog posts, which was identified as a high-value feature through direct customer engagement. This insight transformed HockeyStack into a targeted solution for SaaS marketers seeking clear ROI measurement.
- Prioritization based on customer demand: Arda employs a straightforward prioritization framework centered on customer requests and frequency of demand. Features and integrations requested by more users receive higher priority, ensuring that development resources target real user needs.
- Maintaining operational agility: Arda manages the technical stack by choosing the simplest technology suitable for each stage of the company’s growth, enabling rapid feature deployment and removal of unused functionality to keep the product lean.
Market Positioning and Target Customers
HockeyStack’s primary customers are B2B SaaS companies, with an emphasis on marketing and revenue operations teams that require granular insights into inbound revenue attribution. The product appeals to SaaS businesses that:
- Need to correlate marketing efforts directly with revenue outcomes.
- Desire ease of integration and minimal setup burden.
- Require dashboards and reporting tools that simplify complex data into actionable intelligence.
Initial traction came through smaller agencies and e-commerce customers; however, the decisive pivot towards SaaS marketing teams emerged from ongoing customer conversations and product usage patterns revealing their unique needs.
Leadership and Strategic Insights
Arda is recognized for his strategic emphasis on prioritization and resource optimization, advocating focused effort on the 20% of work that generates 80% of impact. He encourages his team to continuously refine what features to build and maintain, removing unused ones to reduce complexity and enhance user experience.
He also promotes leadership accountability by assuming the heavier setup and configuration tasks internally, ensuring the customer journey from onboarding to active product use is streamlined and frictionless.
Public Engagements and Thought Leadership
Arda Bulut shares his expertise through interviews and podcast appearances such as in the "Built Right" series by HatchWorks, where he discusses product-market fit, scaling product development, and prioritization principles. These engagements underscore his role as a technical and strategic thought leader within the SaaS community.
Summary
Arda Bulut, as CTO and co-founder of HockeyStack, leverages his technical background from Brown University and a deeply customer-focused development approach to lead a fast-growing, well-funded SaaS analytics platform. His leadership prioritizes usability, rapid iteration, and data-driven feature development, positioning HockeyStack as a critical tool for B2B SaaS companies seeking clear attribution and revenue insights. The company’s recent $20 million Series A funding and growing customer base demonstrate strong market validation and scalability potential under his technical stewardship.
