How does a startup go from $0 to $10m ARR just 12 months after launch?
That’s a question I get asked a lot as a co-founder, because that’s exactly what we’ve done at fonio.ai.
But, if you’re expecting some secret growth hack or clever sales strategy, I’m probably going to disappoint you.
For me, the biggest lesson from our first year is simple: focus on your customers.
We started fonio.ai in Austria with a straightforward idea: use AI to improve customer service, particularly the way businesses handle phone conversations with their customers.
We knew the technology was exciting, but we also knew that having good technology wasn’t enough to build a successful business.
From the start, we spent time talking to customers, understanding their problems and figuring out what they needed from us.
We didn’t want to build something just because AI made it possible. We wanted to solve a problem that businesses genuinely had.
But there’s a big difference between saying you listen to customers and building your business around them.
We’ve learned that those conversations shouldn’t happen AFTER you’ve built something. They should happen BEFORE you build it.
When we launch a new product, we don’t build it first and then try to sell it. We build it alongside customers.
When we were developing our email product, for example, we spoke to nearly 20 customers to understand what they needed and what they would pay for.
That process helps in two ways. You build something that solves a real problem, while also getting a better sense of demand and pricing before investing heavily in it.
You’re not spending months building something only to discover that customers don’t want it in the way you expected.
That approach has also shaped how we enter new markets. We learned that trying to launch into several countries at once didn’t work particularly well for us.
Now, we enter a market with someone who understands it from the inside, test different approaches with a relatively small amount of investment and then move quickly once we find something that works.
For me, there’s a broader lesson there: speed isn’t necessarily about doing everything faster. It’s about getting to the right answer faster.
If you can test an idea, learn from customers and stop doing something that isn’t working, you can move much faster than a business that spends six months trying to get everything perfect before launching.
AI is moving incredibly quickly, and it’s easy to get distracted by the latest model or feature.
But most customers aren’t interested in the technology for the sake of it. They want to know one thing: does it solve my problem?
For us, that focus on customers, alongside rapid customer acquisition, played a big part in taking fonio.ai from launch to $10m ARR in just 12 months.
Growing that quickly is exciting, but it also means you must learn quickly and be willing to change direction when something isn’t working.
That’s probably the biggest piece of advice I’d give to other founders: don’t just build for your customers, build with them.
If you can find a real problem, test your assumptions with the people experiencing it and be willing to change course quickly, you’ve got a much stronger foundation for growth.
The aim shouldn’t be to predict exactly what customers will want six months from now. It should be to build a process that lets you find out quickly.
Reaching $10m ARR is something I’m proud of, but I don’t see it as the end.
Our focus is the same as it was at the beginning: keep listening to customers, keep learning and building something they genuinely value.
- fonio.ai was founded in 2024 by Daniel Keinrath and Matthias Gruber. The company raised $17m in June 2026, led by 20VC at a $140m valuation.