Aircall

Olivier R. Payees spent years in strategy consulting before taking on a role as General Manager of an SMB's Iberian operations, where he managed a 200-person unit through heavy restructuring after the 2008 financial crisis. The experience of cutting workforce in half and managing a complex business operations taught him about execution and resilience, but left him craving something different. "I just thought, hey, I mean, that's, you know, it's too big of a company as a whole. And I want to just build my own and just be on a gross curve rather than on a restructuring curve," he recalls.

Olivier spotted a clear market gap: while companies had amazing tools for file sharing, chat, and collaboration, phone support solutions were stuck in the past—complicated, difficult to deploy, and frustrating to use. He partnered with a few friends from his consulting days to build Aircall, an incredibly simple cloud phone solution designed specifically for modern companies.

The team started with three co-founders plus two successful serial entrepreneurs who provided initial funding and guidance—one had sold a previous startup to Adobe. Rather than hiring a traditional CTO, they brought in developer talent directly. As the business grew, they realized their sales and marketing person was pulling as much weight as the founders themselves, so they distributed equity from their own stakes to properly incentivize these early operators. Olivier retained 30% ownership after multiple funding rounds and equity grants.

The company officially launched on June 1, 2015. Development of their first key feature—integrations with platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Desk, and Pipedrive—took about two weeks and proved to be the turning point.

In June, July, and August 2015, with no brand recognition or inbound traffic, Olivier and team took a direct approach: they identified vertical markets they believed would benefit most (marketplaces, SaaS companies) and reached out manually. This initial traction was solid but limited. Then they released integrations with major platforms—Salesforce, Zendesk, Desk, Pipedrive, and Slack. This was the inflection point. "The big move was when we released our integrations," Olivier explains.

The integration strategy worked brilliantly. Users would install Zendesk for ticketing and email, then realize they needed a phone solution. They'd search the Zendesk marketplace, find Aircall near the top, and sign up. Within a few months, integrations accounted for 80% of their customer acquisition—essentially free traffic with only the two-week development cost.

Their customer acquisition model was remarkably lean. They charged $12-$48 per user per month, converted 30% of free trial users to paid plans, with average customer paying $100/month. Rather than spending heavily on marketing, they invested in conversion: when someone signed up, a human would call them on day one and day one of their trial, bookended by automated onboarding emails.

By December 2015—just seven months after launch—they hit $100,000 MRR, having grown 30% month-over-month. More impressively, they achieved negative churn starting in October 2015, meaning existing customers expanded faster than new ones churned. With only 3-5% customer churn and 5-15% monthly growth from expansion alone, they built a compounding growth machine. In January 2016, they closed a $2.8M seed round from Dalberton and Fender's Club on top of their initial $500K investment.

Olivier set an ambitious goal: multiply revenue by 5x to reach $500,000 MRR by December 2016. To do that, he was hiring aggressively—doubling from two people to six in the customer conversion team in January alone, and adding customer success and content marketing functions. The company was used by Uber, Deliveroo, and numerous other on-demand and tech companies. With a clear product-market fit, negative churn, and a scalable integration-driven acquisition model, Aircall was positioned to become a leader in the now-massive cloud communications space.