1) The structural problem that no one had bothered to solve
In 2013, Thibault Lauzeral was trying to set up a phone system at Fotolia. What he found was a landscape of expensive, legacy, on-premise hardware, completely disconnected from the SaaS tools the business already ran on. Nobody had built a cloud-based business phone system that integrated natively with CRMs and help desks.
The idea that came out of this experience was narrow and concrete: let companies spin up a call center anywhere in the world, in minutes, connected to the tools they already use. Not another telecom. A software product that sat on top of existing telecom infrastructure.
This framing (software, not telco) would turn out to be one of the most consequential decisions Aircall ever made. Years later, Jonathan reflected: “If we had positioned ourselves as a telco, our valuation would be terrible. By staying pure software, we built something completely different.”
“We decided from day one: we are not a telco. We are software. And history proved us right.”
2) The months before launch: a free MVP and a founding disagreement
The first version of Aircall was free and stripped down to almost nothing: you could receive calls. No outbound. You got a phone number, a basic greeting message, and hours of operation. That was it.
Within a month and a half, they had about a hundred users, mostly small businesses that wanted a professional-looking phone presence without a landline. The team watched how people used it, then added outbound calling.
Then came the first real test of the founding team: should they charge? Jonathan pushed back. The product felt too immature. His co-founder Olivier disagreed. They switched to paid. Fifty percent of free users churned immediately.
Jonathan now describes that moment as one of the most valuable early lessons. The half who stayed had a genuine problem to solve. Their feedback was actionable in a way that free users’ never was. “When people pay, what they tell you actually means something. Free users can say anything.”
“Once people pay, their feedback is real. Free users can tell you anything. You have no idea if it actually matters.”
3) The human moment: selling on Skype, scrapping the Web Summit
Before there were sales processes, there was Jonathan doing demos on Skype, sharing his personal account ID with prospects and hoping they’d connect. This was 2014. Zoom barely existed.
For lead generation, he scraped the full attendee list of Web Summit: 3,000 names, companies, and guessed email addresses constructed as firstname@companyurl.com. He emailed all of them, claiming to have met them at the event. Some replied.
He also built prospect lists by scraping every website in France and Europe that displayed a phone number (indicated by a “+” in the HTML). If they had a number, they were a potential customer. “We had tens of thousands of prospects this way. It was completely artisanal, but it worked.”
Alone, he reached €10K MRR. Then two interns joined. Then came the TechCrunch article following their first fundraise of €900K, and 20 new sign-ups appeared overnight.
“I emailed 3,000 people from the Web Summit pretending I’d spoken to them. Some responded. That’s how we got our first customers.”
4) First clients: what those early deals actually looked like
Early Aircall contracts were priced at €20/month for three users. That’s €6.66 per seat. Closing ten companies in a week meant €200 in new MRR.
The economics were painful but revealing. The customers who stayed at that price had a real need. The company’s ICP at this stage was clear: startups and SMBs who wanted a professional phone system without the friction of traditional telco. Companies that already had a number on their website but nothing real behind it.
Jonathan’s sales motion was relentless outbound: cold email, “warm calling” (which meant the prospect had received at least two emails before being called), and constant iteration on messaging. He describes it as “cambouille”: getting your hands dirty, grinding through the work no one else wants to do.
One of his most counterintuitive findings from this period: most of his “inbound” leads were actually outbound-seeded. Prospects who had received his cold emails but never responded would show up later as self-serve sign-ups. The outbound created awareness; the conversion happened silently.
“70% of what I thought was inbound was actually people who had received a cold email weeks earlier and signed up on their own.”
5) Why people bought before the product was obviously good
For four years (from 2014 to 2018), Aircall’s voice quality was poor. NPS was around -60. Customers would tell prospects it didn’t work. Jonathan openly walked into sales meetings knowing the word-of-mouth was negative.
And yet they closed deals. Revenue grew from €1M to €3M to €9M to €18M ARR, year over year.
Three things made this possible. First, the market was pulling: nobody had a better cloud-based alternative. The timing was exceptional. “The market carried us. Like saying Anthropic isn’t carried by AI. It’s the same thing.”
Second, the product’s value proposition was genuinely compelling even when the voice quality dropped. What Aircall could do (spin up a multi-user call center anywhere, integrated with Zendesk and Salesforce) was new enough that customers tolerated the frustration.
Third, and most surprisingly, the customer success team. Jonathan describes clients who wanted to leave but stayed because of how Aircall’s team treated them. “We had clients say: ‘I want to leave, but your customer success team treats us like family. They roll up their sleeves and fix things.’ That team saved us.”
“Customers told us: ‘I hate you as much as I love you. I want to leave but I can’t. Your product does things nothing else does.’”
6) The product evolution: from broken voice to the integration layer
The moment Aircall became a different company was in San Francisco, in the summer of 2015, during their 500 Startups cohort. US customers were asking for something French customers hadn’t pushed for yet: native integrations with their CRM and helpdesk tools.
In France, the SaaS ecosystem was still catching up. In the US, Zendesk was exploding. Salesforce was everywhere. Customers wanted a phone call to automatically log into the contact record. They wanted call outcomes to sync with their pipeline.
Aircall built the integration layer. Partners (Zendesk resellers, Salesforce consultants) started recommending Aircall to their customers. The company went from €10K to €50K MRR in four months, ending the year at €60K MRR.
Jonathan remembers closing that year’s target at 8pm on December 31st. “We hit exactly what we said we’d hit. That created something in the team: when we say we’ll do something, we do it.”
“In the US, we realized the product was missing its real layer: integrations. That was the unlock.”
7) The founding team dynamic: roles, equity, and the tractor tattoo
Four co-founders, clearly separated roles from day one. Olivier handled product and finance. Pierre-Baptiste did backend. Xavier did frontend. Jonathan owned revenue: go-to-market, sales, everything commercial.
The clearest expression of the founding team’s culture came in 2016, during a particularly dark stretch. The product wasn’t working. They went to get a kebab from the corner shop, came back, and made a pact: if the company ever reached €100M valuation, they’d all get a tractor tattoo.
The tractor had started as an emoji. A departing intern had signed off with a 🚜 in a Slack message, and Jonathan had felt something. “We’re not a rocket. A rocket hits its target once every ten tries. We’re tractors. We till the ground, we do the work, we get there.”
By 2018, the company hit €100M. They went to Corsica and found a tattoo parlor. Jonathan (who hates tattoos) spoke Bulgarian to the Corsican tattooist and asked him to dilute the ink. He got it on his hip, where no one would see it. Olivier got a tractor the size of a fist on his ankle.
“On se tatoue un tracteur. We are not a rocket. Rockets hit their target one time in ten. We till the ground.”
8) What he’d do differently: sell yourself, ignore the noise
Jonathan’s most direct advice: founders who refuse to sell are making a self-destructive choice. He watched too many CEOs delegate sales to avoid looking like a small company. He did it himself at his next venture, Offstone, and caught himself in the mistake in real time.
His second piece of advice: ignore geographic constraints. Aircall built its first €30K of MRR without leaving Paris. The US expansion accelerated things, but wasn’t the cause of product-market fit. “You can be in Clermont-Ferrand, build a team, prove it works, generate revenue. Geography is in your head.”
He’s also skeptical of the pressure to grow fast. Aircall’s path from 0 to €1M ARR took two years. “Don’t tell yourself your company is bad because someone else did 0-to-1M in three months. Focus on your product and your commercial execution.”
On the question of overwork: Jonathan is honest that Aircall ran seven days a week for years. But he’s careful not to present that as the secret. “Working more makes you better faster. But I don’t think success requires 24/7 grind. What it requires is resilience: showing up every day for years, even when you’re not sure it’s going to work.”
“C’est pas le meilleur produit qui gagne, c’est malheureusement le meilleur vendeur. The best seller wins, not the best product.”
The takeaway
Aircall’s 0-to-1M story is not a story about product excellence. It’s a story about what happens when you combine an anomalous market window, a sales culture built from scratch, and a founding team that treated customers like family even when the product let them down.
The NPS of -60 for four years is the detail that most founders skip over, because it’s uncomfortable. It forces the question: what actually drives early revenue? The answer from Aircall is blunt: timing, relentless outbound, the right integrations at the right moment, and a customer success team that made clients feel too taken care of to leave.
What Jonathan calls “being a tractor” isn’t just a metaphor for hard work. It’s a philosophy of compounding. Tractors don’t get airborne. They cover ground, row by row, and the harvest comes. The decade-long trajectory of Aircall (from a €6.66 SaaS with a broken voice layer to a billion-dollar company) is what that philosophy looks like at scale.
