How Tally Forms CEO Marie Martens grew Tally Forms to $4M revenue and 150K customers in 2025.

good morning everyone I'm really excited to be here with you today thank you so much for the kind introduction Nathan and for uh yeah for inviting us um looking at the intro video I think we're one of the smaller fish here today we have a bit of a different story uh because we're bootstrapped um and so yeah I'm gonna share a bit more about how we bootstrapped our form Builder tool tally uh 250k mrr with a team a small team of four so I'm Marie I'm the co-founder of tally um and I'm going in the next 20 minutes show you a little bit more about how he came up with the idea how do we grow Sally and how do we now try to scale it with a small team and to start at the beginning where did it all start right so if I say we may be important I mean myself and my co-founder Philip he's sitting over there maybe you can wave Philip is a technical brain behind tally he's also my partner in life um he's born in Bulgaria I was born and raised in Belgium I have mainly a background in B2B marketing and Philip is a full stack engineer he has joined and also founded other startups before and to really start at the beginning we need to go back to 2018 to this beach in Mexico because tally was actually another first startup idea we had a completely different idea when we started we actually wanted to build a Marketplace for hotels and travel influencers so nothing to do with forms or with no code it kind of stayed with an ID because we were both working full-time somewhere else now in 2019 Delta which was the last startup that Philip has founded was actually acquired by etoro so that means we had a bit of Runway and also a bit of time and he decided to start working on Hotspot that was our idea to launch something in travel Tech now we got our first customers we also had some couple of thousands of influencers on the platform so I also decided to quit my job and to go full time in on this on this project we also had always had the dream to actually live like the digital Nomad lifestyle work remotely and build a business while we were doing that little did we know that 2020 would be the worst time ever to launch a startup and travel we had like just yeah really bad timing we had a little bit of Revenue but in a matter of a week we kind of lost uh half of our customers we just arrived in Bangkok because you know we were gonna become digital Nomads but that didn't really happen we had to fly back after uh one week disappointed in an empty uh plane back to Belgium now as I said before we're bootstrapped right so we didn't really have a lot of time we were both full-time in on this I was also pregnant at the time small detail so we gave ourselves like one year of Runway and by the summer we decided that we had to Pivot we had to do something else so when we decided that we actually started like uh brainstorming about other ideas and excuse me I have a bit of a cold and form Builders was actually something was a product that we had both used before I used a lot of form builders in my previous jobs but we had never really found a tool that we love to use for a couple of reasons so you have Google forms right it's free it's amazing but we don't really like the form building experience and we also don't like the form design of it then you have more well-known players like jotform Type 4 but they can get really expensive especially when you're a bootstrap founder because they have volume based pricing so you know you collect more than 10 submissions and you need to start paying you hit the payroll that's also an experience that we didn't like so we wanted to do things a bit differently at the same time we were also using notion and notion you know is a Community First Tool people love to use it so we thought how can we translate that into the form building business how can how can we make forms fun again and that's kind of how we came up with the idea of tally this is how Sally looks like um might be new for for most of you it has a text editor approach so you can basically just type and insert any type of block uh with shortcuts we also made it largely free which is one of our USPS so basically you can access anything that you need to create to share forms for free and um you can also collect unlimited number of submissions and create unlimited number of forms for free and so that's actually where our Story begins and where the first section of this presentation begins so we're situated here in the first couple of months basically where we started building our MVP until we got our first users so the main question here was we didn't really have an audience how can we find people that want to use our form builder in an already very competitive market we're bootstrapped we didn't have any budget so we kind of thought where can we find those Creator startups that we were targeting so we decided to go to product hunt and basically find people that had upvoted similar products right so we would go check find other Founders that had upvoted form building tools we would uh reach out to them and do this over and over and over again for about half a year actually so we had contacted thousands of people by Cold Outreach and that is how we found our first users in a very non-scalable way and this actually introduced us in new communities Founders leg groups also no code communities and that's how we found uh yeah our first users we're also scanning conversations online mainly on Twitter but also Indie hackers Reddit and whenever it was relevant we would start and Pitch tally the same time we're also building in public which means we basically share everything we're an open startup so we share our Revenue we share our processes so we do this to build an audience but also to get feedback from those first users this also shows that we're in it for the long run and that we're shipping fast it also builds trusts with our audience these are just some of the examples of things that we've shared we have a public roadmap we are very transparent about what we're building next we've also shared what it costs to run tally how does our forecast Revenue template look like we've measured our product Market fit share those results so all of that you can actually find on our blog so after a couple of months we're actually more than six months we felt ready to launch our own product on product and now you might wonder why did we wait so long um because it's such a competitive space we really wanted to make sure that we had all the crucial features that our competitors also had so basically we kept on building the product and while Gathering feedback we also found our first around thousand users and so in March 21 we kind of felt ready to um yeah to launch tally on product hunt we made sure that we were prepared um so we actually have this checklist that we also published you can also find it on our website if anyone would be planning a product and launch probably not in this room but you never know um so what did we do we made sure that we had the newsletter we had social media updates we had everything prepared to have a yeah to make sure that the launch went went well it was kind of a roller coaster we were like product number one for 23 hours of the day and then we kind of lost the spot in the last hour we ended up product number four but that was not really important I think the important thing was that we got tons of positive feedback that day so we could really validate our products and we knew we're building something that people actually want to use um we also doubled our user base from 1500 to 3 000 people in one day so that was really like the first kind of push of growth that we needed all right so that brings us to the second uh section how are we actually growing tally um and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about the market we're active in uh the model that we use and also how our product fits into all of that now important to know is that tally has a product-led growth model so acquisition conversion and retention are all primarily driven by the product itself all right so right now we are here on the graph just um a year and a half after our public launch until a couple of months ago really so to start with the markets um you know being a big fish in a little bond isn't really fruitful for product-led companies um so the industry and the audience needed to be big enough to support our product lab growth since we were going to invest a lot of time and energy into lowering the activation barriers and if we would only be selling to a couple of people it wouldn't make sense to to try to create a scalable operation so luckily you know a lot of people have done this before us form Builders are not new um so we knew that it was demand we knew that it was possible to build a successful business in form building every company needs a form right at some some parts in their Journey so we're active in a growing SME Market especially after covet with the growing and focused on digitalization and we're also writing a no code hype or wave with more and more people adopting no code Technologies especially statistics to save time and costs so all of that makes this an interesting market for us to be active in all right so we also of course needed a business model that fits this product-led growth...