How Fatih Coşkun Bootstrapped complead to 800+ Financial Institutions in 80 Countries

When Fatih Coşkun landed his first customer for Sanction Scanner in 2020, he didn’t close the deal over a Zoom demo or a cold email sequence. He walked up two flights of stairs, knocked on the door of the payment institution renting space above his office, and asked if they’d like to try what he was building. Six years later, that first-customer instinct still runs through everything about the company he now calls complead: a bootstrapped, profitable risk infrastructure platform, built without a single dollar of outside funding.

Fatih spent five and a half years at Mastercard before launching a services company, Codevist, that eventually bankrolled the early days of what would become complead. Along the way, he’s assembled a nearly 40-person team, earned a spot on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Türkiye list four years running, collected customer reviews that put him at the top of G2’s AML category, and quietly built the kind of content engine that attracts links from The New York Times, the BBC, and Harvard. In the conversation below, he shares how he thinks about pricing, trust, hiring, competing against vendors with hundreds of millions in funding, and why he still refuses to call the business a success.

How much revenue and profit does the business generate?

We don’t publish exact numbers, but I’m happy to share the shape of it: we’re profitable, we’ve never raised a single dollar of outside capital, and we’re on our way to eight figures in annual revenue.

Tell us about yourself and your business.

I’m Fatih, a computer engineer by training (Istanbul Technical University) and a builder by habit. In college I was a Microsoft Student Partner and did internships at a couple of banking software companies, so I got hooked early on the place where software meets money. After graduating I spent five and a half years at Mastercard as a program manager. That’s where I learned how payments really work behind the scenes, and how much of the industry’s energy goes into one quiet question: should we let this person, or this money, through?

In 2014 I started Codevist, a software company building payment, fintech and banking solutions, and a couple of years later I co-founded Esnek Ödeme, a collection management tool for dealers, freelancers and small businesses. Those years taught me how to sell to financial institutions, how to ship under real constraints and how to keep a company alive on its own revenue.

In 2020 I started Sanction Scanner, which today is complead. We’re AI-native risk infrastructure for fraud and financial crime. In plain English: banks, fintechs, payment and e-money companies, crypto exchanges and other regulated businesses need to know who they’re dealing with and whether the money moving through them is clean. We help them do that with sanctions and PEP screening, adverse media, KYC and KYB, transaction monitoring and fraud prevention, all running on one engine we call Fusion. More than 800 financial institutions in over 80 countries use us today. In September 2026 we rebranded from Sanction Scanner to complead because we had simply outgrown our name. Sanction Scanner lives on as our sanctions and PEP screening product.

How does your business make money?

We’re a B2B software company, so it’s subscriptions. Customers pay for the platform plus usage, meaning the volume of screenings, checks and transactions they run through us. We moved away from per-seat pricing a while ago, because our customers aren’t really buying logins. They’re buying decisions. Pricing is quote-based, since a five-person crypto startup and a mid-size bank have very different needs, but anyone can start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.

Customers use us in two ways. Some work inside our web platform, where compliance teams review alerts and manage cases. Others call our API, so the checks happen inside their own onboarding and payment flows and their customers never see us. We’re also building out a partner program for companies that want to embed or resell complead as part of their own offering.

What was your inspiration for starting the business?

The idea came straight out of a real problem. While working with one of Mastercard’s customers, we ran into a gap: they had to screen their customers against sanctions lists and watchlists, and the tools on the market were built for big banks. They were expensive, slow to integrate and so noisy that the compliance team spent most of the day clearing obvious non-matches.

I’m an engineer, so my first reaction was, “We can build this better.” My second thought was that this customer wasn’t alone. Every payment company, fintech and crypto platform was facing the same regulations with a fraction of a bank’s budget. That felt like a business, not just a feature.

How and when did you launch the business?

We started in early 2020. I put together a small team of engineers and we shipped fast for about six months: screening against global sanctions and PEP lists, an API and a simple dashboard. It wasn’t perfect, but it solved the core problem well.

There was no big launch event. For us, launch day was the day our first customer started using the product for real. After that, most of our roadmap was written by customers. They kept asking us to cover the next step in their compliance process, and over a few years those requests turned a screening tool into a full platform.

How is the business funded?

Fully bootstrapped. We’ve never raised outside capital.

In the early days three things paid the bills: revenue from Codevist, my personal savings and revenue from our first customers, which we reinvested right away. Today the business funds itself and it’s profitable. Do I have anything against investors? Not at all. Money is useful to everyone, and we just haven’t needed it so far. If the right partner comes along, someone who brings more than a check and helps us get where we’re going faster, why not? But we’ll never raise just because everyone else in our space did. Being profitable means we get to choose.

How did you find your first few clients or customers?

A bit of everything: our own network, cold outreach, early SEO content and people signing up for a free trial. But the very first one is still my favorite story.

Our first customer was an established payment institution with an office two floors above ours. They were our neighbors, and they had exactly the problem we were solving. So I didn’t send an email or ask anyone for an intro. I walked up two floors and knocked on their door. They became our first customer.

It sounds small, but it shaped how we still sell. In compliance, trust is everything, and nothing builds trust like showing up in person, listening to the real problem and then delivering. After that, our network from the Mastercard and Codevist years opened a few more doors, cold outreach filled the gaps, and slowly our content started bringing people to us on its own.

What was your first year in business like?

Long. I was working well over 70 hours a week. Six years in, there are still weeks when I go past 70, but the first year was more than that.

I was the product manager, the salesperson, the support line and the person reading sanctions regulations late at night to understand exactly what our customers needed. Because we had money from Codevist and my own savings behind us, we didn’t have to take every deal at any price, which was a big advantage. But I wanted paying customers as fast as possible, because nothing validates a product like someone paying for it.

The other thing I remember is how much we learned from customers. Compliance is a field where the details decide everything: how a name is transliterated from Arabic or Cyrillic, how often a country updates its sanctions list, what an auditor actually expects to see. We learned most of that by sitting with customers, not by reading about it.

What strategies did you use to grow the business?

We never had a big marketing budget, so every strategy had to be cheap, compounding and good at building trust. Five things did most of the work.

1. Content and SEO, our biggest engine. Compliance officers spend their days searching for answers: what changed in a sanctions program, how a new rule works, why a bank got fined. So we wrote about exactly those things, in depth, from sanctions programs and country-by-country AML rules to the biggest money laundering scandals and the FATF Travel Rule. We wrote to be useful, not to sell. Over the years that content earned links from more than 4,000 websites, including The New York Times, the BBC, Harvard and Investopedia. It still brings us customers every week, and it doesn’t cost us anything per lead.

2. Let people try before they talk to sales. Most compliance vendors hide behind a “book a demo” button. We offered a free trial (today it’s 14 days, no credit card), a well-documented API and a set of free tools. A developer at a fintech could test us in an afternoon. For smaller companies, that’s often the whole buying process. For bigger ones, it means that by the time we meet, they already know the product works.

3. Reviews as borrowed trust. Nobody in compliance wants to be the first to buy from an unknown vendor. So from early on, we asked happy customers to share their experience on G2, Capterra and Gartner Peer Insights. Today we’re rated 4.7 on G2, 5.0 on Capterra and 4.8 on Gartner Peer Insights, and we’ve been a Leader in G2’s AML category for three years running. For a buyer who has never heard of us, those reviews do more than any ad could.

4. Independent recognition, chosen carefully. I’m not a big believer in conferences and awards for their own sake. But for a self-funded company selling to banks, outside validation matters. Making the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Türkiye list four years in a row, the Deloitte Fast 500 EMEA list twice and Inc. Türkiye’s fastest-growing companies list twice, and being picked as a finalist in the MoneySurge competition at Money20/20 Middle East, gave procurement teams one less reason to say no.

5. Build a product customers grow into. The cheapest growth is a customer who stays and expands. We built everything on one engine, so a customer who starts with sanctions screening can add transaction monitoring, KYB or fraud prevention without a new integration or a second vendor. That one design choice turned every new customer into a future expansion.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

Trust. We were a small, self-funded company from Türkiye asking banks and regulated institutions to trust us with one of their most sensitive processes. If our screening misses a sanctioned person, that’s not a bug. It’s a regulatory problem for our customer. Every procurement team asks the same questions: Who are you? Will you be around in five years? Can you pass our security review? On top of that, we compete with companies that have raised tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars and have the sales teams and marketing budgets to match.

We didn’t have a shortcut, so we earned trust piece by piece: SOC 2 Type II, a 99.995% uptime SLA, treating every security questionnaire seriously, collecting reviews and building references one customer at a time. And over time we turned bootstrapping into an argument in our favor. We don’t depend on the next funding round to survive. For a compliance buyer, a vendor that’s profitable and independent is a vendor that won’t disappear.

What have been the most significant keys to your business’s success?

The first is customer obsession. Almost every big product decision we’ve made started with a customer telling us about a problem. We set up our support team to follow outcomes, not to close tickets, because in our world a closed ticket and a solved problem are not the same thing.

The second is speed. We’re engineers at heart, and we can go from a customer conversation to a shipped feature faster than most of the bigger players. The third is discipline. We spend what we earn, which forces us to focus on what matters. And the fourth is just persistence. There’s no secret here. It’s a long game, and we’ve kept showing up every day for six years.

Tell us about your team.

We’re close to 40 people, all full-time, and we work together from the office. Most of the team is engineering: our platform team, data engineering and the team building our AI agents. The rest is customer success, sales and marketing, and compliance know-how is spread across everyone. In a field where so much knowledge is learned by doing, sitting next to each other makes us faster.

We’re still small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is working on, and I’d like to keep that feeling even as we grow. Right now we’re hiring a hands-on marketer to help take the complead story further.

How did you make the transition from side hustle to full-time?

My path was a bit unusual: it went through a services company first. I started Codevist in 2014 while I was still at Mastercard, building payment and banking software for clients. For about two years I did both, which meant evenings and weekends were Codevist time. In 2016, once Codevist could pay its own way, I left Mastercard and went full-time.

Codevist then became the engine that funded what came next. When I started Sanction Scanner in 2020, I didn’t treat it as another side project. I moved my full focus to it from day one, and the money Codevist had earned, plus my own savings, gave us the runway to build until the product found its first customers. If you’re bootstrapping, I think a services business is an underrated way to fund a product. It keeps you close to customers and it pays the bills while you figure things out.

What was the turning point when you knew your business was successful?

I haven’t said it yet, and I don’t think we’re there. There have been moments that told me we were on the right track: walking two floors up and coming back with our first customer, making the Deloitte Fast 50 list for the fourth year in a row, seeing more than 800 financial institutions in over 80 countries use something we built. But “successful” feels like a finish line, and I don’t see one. The day I think we’ve made it is probably the day we start to slow down.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned growing the business?

Profitability is freedom. When you’re profitable, you get to say no: to the wrong customer, to the wrong deal, to the wrong money. A lot of founders see bootstrapping as a limitation. For me, it’s what let us build the product we believed in, on our own timeline, without someone else’s growth targets deciding our roadmap.

What separates your business from your competitors?

First, we built one engine instead of buying one. Many of the bigger players in our market grew through acquisitions. From the outside they look like one platform, but inside they’re often separate systems stitched together, with separate data. We didn’t have the money to buy companies, so we had to build everything on one data and risk layer. That started as a constraint and turned into our biggest advantage: one customer record, one risk score and one audit trail.

Second, data depth. The edge cases big vendors tend to treat as an afterthought, like local sanctions lists, non-Latin names and emerging markets, were our starting point. We track more than 3,000 sources covering over 220 countries. Third, explainability. Every decision our system makes can be traced back to its source and its rule, which is what auditors care about. And finally, accessibility. A mid-size customer working with us talks to the people who can actually change the product, not to an account manager in a queue.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

Never tell yourself you’ve made it. The moment you do, you stop listening, and the market will notice before you do.

Two more things. Get your first paying customer as early as you can, even if that means knocking on your neighbor’s door. And keep your head down. Conferences, panels and PR can feel like progress, but most of the time they’re not. Building the product and talking to customers is the work.

What is your favorite quote?

“You can skip all the parties, all the conferences, all the press, all the tweets. Build a great product and get users and win.” (Sam Altman)

I come back to this one a lot. As a bootstrapped founder, my time is the scarcest resource we have, and this is a good reminder of where it should go.

What are your future plans for the business?

The rebrand to complead was the first step. Next is the US: we’re building a presence in New York and focusing on payment companies, fintechs, crypto businesses and mid-size banks and credit unions, a segment I think is underserved. The big vendors are too heavy and expensive for them, and the small tools don’t hold up in an audit.

On the product side, we want AI agents to handle the routine work, so compliance teams can spend their time on cases that need human judgment. And we’ll keep adding products on the same engine. The goal is to cross eight figures in revenue while staying profitable and independent.

If you had to start from scratch, where would you begin?

Exactly where I did: with one painful problem for one customer I could walk to. That part I wouldn’t change.

A few things I’d do differently. I’d start writing content on day one, because it compounds and it’s the best long-term investment we ever made. I’d invest in our data foundation even earlier, because in this business data quality decides everything. And I’d pick a name that leaves room to grow. “Sanction Scanner” described exactly what we did in 2020, which was great until we started doing much more. Six years later, we had to rename the company.

What are some of your favorite books, blogs, podcasts, or YouTube channels?

Books: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is the most honest book I know about running a company when things go wrong. Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, the Zappos story, shaped how I think about customer obsession.

Podcasts: Practical Founders Podcast with Greg Head, conversations with capital-efficient software founders who built real businesses without chasing venture money. Lenny’s Podcast for product and growth. And Acquired for deep dives into how great companies were built.