How Iris Khan built Fonti by keeping text styling free
Iris Khan is the founder of Iris Labs, which built Fonti, a free browser-based Unicode text styler with more than 350 styles and no signup. The conversation covers how a small discovery became a tool, how users find it, and why accessibility matters when styling text.
A useful tool can find users through consistent, low-cost distribution, but product decisions should also account for how people using screen readers experience the output.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
It honestly started as curiosity. I kept seeing these curly, fancy letters in Instagram bios and I wanted to figure out how people were doing it, because Instagram does not let you choose a font in your bio. Turns out they are not fonts at all. They are Unicode characters that just look like fonts, so they work anywhere you can paste text. I am still a beginner developer and I build everything in public, so I turned that little discovery into Fonti. You type normal text and it gives you 350 plus styled versions to copy. No signup, no app, nothing to install. And it is free, which I suppose is the main difference, because most tools in this space want you to download something or pay.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Fonti does not make money, so customers is the wrong word. It is just users. The first ones came when I launched publicly in October, on Product Hunt and a bunch of free startup directories where I submitted it myself, one at a time. These days most new people find it on Google, because the pages slowly started getting indexed, and some come from Pinterest, where I post font style pins every day. That is basically it. I have spent exactly nothing on ads. It is just me doing the boring parts consistently.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was to keep everything free, even the parts other tools charge for. Then I went a bit further and open sourced the whole style library on GitHub and npm, so any developer can use the same engine. I did not expect it, but that changed how I see Fonti. It is not just my website anymore. The mistake was dumber. I assumed styled text was harmless fun, and only later found out those characters break search and screen readers. Someone using a screen reader hears nonsense where a name should be. That stayed with me. Now I check what a style does to real people before I add it.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
People have got impatient, in a good way. If a tool does not work on their phone in a few seconds, for free, without an account, they just leave. Finding tools changed too. Half the time someone asks Google or an AI assistant instead of browsing around. I have adapted in small ways, nothing fancy. Fonti is mobile first, it loads fast, and there is no paywall to design around. And AI is also the reason I can run this alone at all. I do the product, the writing, the listings, the outreach. A few years ago that was a small team’s job.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: make one small thing that actually works, keep it free, and test it on your own phone before you show anyone, because that is where your users live anyway. Then put it where your users already are, and keep showing up. Ignore: the people who email you selling guaranteed rankings and instant traffic. I get those emails too. Growth for me has been slow and a bit boring, honestly, but it is real, and it does not vanish the day an algorithm changes its mood.
Thank you to Iris Khan and the team at Iris Labs for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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