Nunzio Martinello did not set out to build a calendar. He set out to stop losing track of his own work. In an April 2021 post on LinkedIn he described the loop that led to Akiflow: he kept testing new personal task managers and tools to increase his productivity, and none of them was actually making him go faster or being more consistent. So he built one.

Akiflow started in 2020. In the post announcing the company's seed round, Martinello wrote that he and his co-founders Sebastiano and Nicola had been accepted into Y Combinator's first ever remote batch, the summer 2020 group that ran entirely over video because nobody could travel.

The first version was not the product Akiflow sells now. It was a command bar, similar to Alfred, that let you fire a keyboard shortcut anywhere on your machine and drop a task into Asana or Trello, or an event onto your calendar. It launched on Product Hunt in August 2020 and finished first for the day. Martinello marked it with a three word post: "#1 on Product Hunt!". Every timing in this story is counted from that launch, 23 August 2020, because it is the earliest date the founders put on the record themselves.

Then came the uncomfortable part. Writing later about why they changed direction, Martinello said they had realised they were only enabling people to manage their sub-optimal productivity system faster. Users were not asking for speed for its own sake. They wanted everything in one place, could not find an app that did that, and were using a fast capture tool to paper over the gap by hand. Selling a quicker shovel to people digging in the wrong field is a good way to get usage that never compounds into retention.

So the team threw the wedge away and rebuilt. The second Akiflow pulled tasks in from wherever they were born, Gmail, Slack, Todoist, Notion, Asana, Trello, ClickUp and anything else through Zapier, into a single inbox, and put that inbox next to a real calendar built for time blocking. The command bar survived the rewrite, because that part had worked. In their Y Combinator launch post the founders described the new build plainly: a full calendar experience, shortcuts, the command bar carried over from Akiflow number one, and small features for the things people do twenty times a day, like joining a call or sharing availability.

Distribution stayed close to the product. Through 2021 the app ran as a seat limited beta. Martinello's April 2021 post ends with an offer of remaining beta seats and a link to book an onboarding call, which is a slow way to grow and a fast way to learn what people actually do with your software. Product Hunt kept working as the product got bigger. By the time of the funding announcement, Akiflow had been product of the day and product of the week there, and Martinello credited an active community of users that kept growing. Pricing was simple from early on: the archived pricing page from November 2021 shows one premium plan at $15 a month, or $12.50 a month billed yearly, after a two week trial.

The clearest sign that the rebuilt product had landed came from the cap table rather than a growth chart. In March 2024 Martinello described how the seed round had actually happened. He was not fundraising, the company was growing and he was focused on execution, and then users who loved the product got on calls and asked whether they could invest. Yaron was one of the first, with Yoni and Robert, and then they told their friends. The round closed in three weeks with more than ten new investors. Akiflow announced it in May 2022 at roughly $1.8 million, led by Benson Oak Ventures. His own takeaway was blunt: all cash is green, but investors who use and love the product are the best thing that can happen to your startup.

Revenue followed the shape of a product people keep paying for rather than one that spikes. On 8 March 2024, Martinello posted that Akiflow had hit $1 million ARR. That is 1,293 days after the August 2020 Product Hunt launch, roughly three and a half years. Twelve months later, on 26 March 2025, he posted $2 million. On 9 September 2025 he posted again: $2.5 million ARR, an increase of $1 million in a year, and in his words not burning cash at all.

That last clause carries more weight than the number in front of it. A Y Combinator company that raised $1.8 million once, back in 2022, and is now adding a million of recurring revenue a year without burning is running a different kind of business from one that has to raise every eighteen months. It also explains the shape of everything before it. The pivot was decided by watching what users were trying to do rather than what they asked for. The price was set high enough that a few thousand paying professionals adds up to a real company. And the growth habit was built on people who use the thing telling other people about it, first on Product Hunt, then in a community, then on investor calls that started as support calls.