How Tally Forms Bootstrapped to $600K Revenue with a Team of 4 (Interview with Co-Founder Marie Martens)

Introduction and Overview

Marie Martens

00:00Good morning, everyone. I'm really excited to be here, with you today. Thank you so much for the kind introduction, Nathan, and for, yeah, for inviting us. Looking at the intro video, I think we're one of the smaller, fish, here today. We have a bit of a different story, because we're bootstrapped. And so, yeah, I'm gonna share a bit more about how we, bootstrapped our form builder tool, tally, to 50 k, MRR with a team, small team

00:28of four. So I'm Marie, I'm the co founder, of tally, and I'm going in the next twenty minutes show you a little bit more about how we came up with the idea, how do we grow tally, and how do we now try to scale it with a small team.

Meet the Founders: Marie and Philip

Marie Martens

00:45And to start at the beginning, where did it all start, right? So if I say we, maybe 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. He's born in Bulgaria. I was born and raised in Belgium. I have mainly a background in b to b marketing, and Philip is a full stack engineer. He has joined and

Origin Story: From Mexico Beach to Belgium

Marie Martens

01:13also 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 not our 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 kinda stayed with an ID because we were both working full time somewhere else. Now

Previous Startup and Pivot to Tally

Marie Martens

01:46in 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.

02:08Now, 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.

02:32Little did we know that 2020 would be the worst time ever to launch a startup in travel. We had like just really bad timing. We had a little bit of revenue but in a matter of a week, we kind of lost 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, one week, disappointed in an empty, plane back

03:02to 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.

03:30So when we decided that, we actually started like, brainstorming about other ideas and excuse me. I have a bit of a cold.

Why Form Builders and the Tally Concept

Marie Martens

03:43And 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

04:08like Jotform, Typeform, 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 a paywall, 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, know, is a community first tool. People love to use it, so

04:33we thought, how can we translate that into the form building business? How can how can we make forms fun again? That's kinda how we came up with the idea of tally.

Finding First Users: Cold Outreach Strategy

Marie Martens

04:47This is how tally looks like. 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 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 you can also collect unlimited number of four submissions and create unlimited number of forms for free.

05:22So 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.

05:40Yeah. So the main question here was we didn't really have an audience. How can we, find people that wanna 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 creators 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

06:09had upvoted form building tools. We would 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 very non scalable way. And this actually introduced us in new, communities, founder's Slack groups, also no code communities, and that's how we found, yeah, our our first users. We're also scanning, conversations online,

06:44mainly on Twitter, but also indie hackers, Reddit, and whenever it was relevant, we would start on on pitch tally.

Building in Public as an Open Startup

Marie Martens

06:54The 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 trust with our audience.

07:21These are just some of the examples of things that we've shared. We have a public road map. 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, shared those results. So all of that you can actually find, on our blog.

Product Hunt Launch in March 2021

Marie Martens

07:45So after a couple of months, well, actually more than six months, we felt ready to launch our own product, on Product Hunt. Now, you might wonder why did we wait so long. 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

08:17March 21, we kind of felt ready to, yeah, to launch tally on product hunt.

08:28We made sure that we were prepared.

08:32So we actually have this checklist that we also published. You can also find it on our website if anyone would, be planning a product hunt launch, probably not in this room, but you never know. 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

08:57like product number one for twenty three hours of the day, and then we kinda 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, wanna use. We also doubled our user base from 500 to 3,000 people, in one

09:26day. So that was really like the first kind of push of growth, that we needed.

Product-Led Growth Model Explained

Marie Martens

09:34Alright. So that brings us to the second, section, how are we actually growing tally? And I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about the market we're active in, 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.

10:09All right. So right now we are here on the graph, just, a year and a half after our public launch, until a couple of months ago really.

10:20So to start with the markets, you know, being a big fish in a little pond isn't really fruitful for product led companies. So the industry and the audience needed to be big enough to support our product led growth since we were we're 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

10:46scalable operation. So luckily, you know, a lot of people have done this before us. Form builders are not new. 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 COVID with a growing and a focus on digitalization. And we're also writing a no code

11:18hype or wave with more and more people adopting no code technologies, especially to just to save time and and costs. So all of that makes this an interesting market for us to be active in.

Business Model: Free Tier and Tally Pro

Marie Martens

11:34Alright. So we also of course needed a business model, that fits this product led growth. And because we're a bootstrap team, it was really important that the product is self-service. Right? So that the barriers are low enough. There's no sign up. You can just go to tally.so, try it out, create a form without actually having to create an account. Now preferably, we would also have a very transparent and low pricing, and, because of the low pricing

12:04and low budgets that we have because we're bootstrapped, we also needed low cost acquisition channels. So how does this theory actually translate into practice for tally? So tally is largely free. Right? So this is kinda how our pricing page looks like. You can get everything that you need to create beautiful forms, to share them, to embed them, to integrate them with your other favorite tools for free. We also don't have a volume based pricing, so you

12:35can create unlimited forms and submissions for free as well.

12:41So you might wonder how do we how do we make money. Besides our free tier, we also have tally pro. It's just very simple. Again, the simplicity comes back in almost everything, we do. And tally pro is a subscription, where we wrap some features like removing the tally branding, having custom domains, team collaboration in one, premium package. It's price priced at 29, dollar a month.

Viral Loop: Powered-By Badge and Word of Mouth

Marie Martens

13:10Alright. So making tally largely free, make sure that there's no barriers to try it out. This also creates positive word-of-mouth about our product, which results in more free users. And free users for us are great, because they actually carry a made with tally badge on their forms. This is an example of a form page and of a thank you page where you can see that our product is really visible. Now doing this, and because forms are

13:39viral by, by nature, a lot of respondents, so you create a form to share it with people. Right? The respondents also get to see our brands and, they discover tally and they also turn into free users.

Conversion Rate and Paying Users

Marie Martens

13:54About 3% of our free users converts to tally pro users, which for now we have around 80,000 free customers and 3% of those or around 2,000 paying tally pro users.

14:12Alright. So how does the product actually fit into all of this?

14:20Excuse me.

14:22So we needed a product that has a broad enough value proposition and it offers a lot of value and offers it really fast to our users. And to do that, we need to make sure, that first of all, we offer a lot of value for free, but we also make it really really easy to use. So whenever we add a new feature, we make sure that we prioritize simplicity. This also limits the complexity of the product

Scaling Customer Support with a Small Team

Marie Martens

14:46and lowers the amount of customer support, which is great because up till now we're still just a team of two. Besides that, what's really important for us is that we have a laser focus on customer support. We were spending more than 50% of our time on talking to users, answering emails, answering Slack messages, and we strongly believe that this is what differentiates us from our competitors. Just a little example of why we do this. This is,

15:19a tally user that had a problem. We managed to fix it within the day. This is a result, basically a love letter about our product, on LinkedIn. And this is really our formula for success. You know, we strive to give the best, product experience as possible, and we turn our users into promoters.

15:44And that brings us to the last, section of my presentation. How are we actually scaling tally with such a small team? As I said before, we until now, we were still, just a team of two. And so now I'm really talking about the last couple of months of our journey.

16:05So concerning customer support, I just mentioned that we were putting more than 50% of our time in this. Yeah. That wasn't very scalable, of course, especially with more than 80 k people worldwide using the product. So we had to hire. This was our first, hire which was really exciting for a small team to go from two to three. And so we hired Richard, a great guy, based in Germany and he is now responsible for customer customer

16:33success. We also made sure that we have a very well thought through elaborate help center, so everyone can basically find their answers there. We have been building a Slack community from start and people can also help out each other, so that's also really a great help for us. And we automate whatever is possible. We use Make, Zapier alternative. This is just an example for, when people apply for a discount. We have discounts for startups, for nonprofits

Engineering Hire and Spam Detection

Marie Martens

17:06as well. The whole flow is automated. People apply, we check if they are eligible, they get the right email and so on.

17:17Then engineering, and that's more Philip's part. I'm non technical founder. So if you would have any questions about this, feel free to reach out to him afterwards. But as you can imagine, a free product, especially a growing one, also attracts a lot of abusers, people that use our product for phishing, to send mass emails, and so on. So we had to spend a lot of time to, automate spam detection, also to scale the infrastructure to make

17:46sure everything kept on running smoothly. So Philip had to spend a lot of time on that combining with customer support. Of course, we also had to hire someone, at this front. And then we hired Ahmed, who's based in Egypt, our first engineer.

Marketing, Community-Led Growth, and What Is Next

Marie Martens

18:04And lastly, marketing, which is my department. So we're heavily relying on our products to grow, but we also feel like that we should start focusing on community led growth, and that will kinda enable us to keep the team small, while having our users helping us out with content creation, also customer support, and of course promotion. We have a couple of ideas around that. Excuse me. Especially, to create, for example, a marketplace where people can actually make

18:37a living out of tally, start selling templates, and also some experience experiments with influencer marketing.

18:47So this is us now. It started with a completely different idea on a beach in Mexico. We're a proud team for, serving more than 80,000, people around the world. So for the last, twenty minutes, I showed you how we came up with tally, how we're growing it, and how we're scaling it with a bootstrap team. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll be around the next day. So if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out,

19:16and enjoy the conference. Thank you.