How Marie Martens grew Tally.so to $100k MRR
In this case study, we learn how Marie Martens grew her form builder Tally.so with her co-founder (and partner) Filip to 250,000 users and an MRR of $100,000.
Full name: Marie Martens
Business: Tally
Started in: 2020
Social Media: Twitter, Linkedin, Twitter (Marie)
Role: Co-founder
Employees: 0
Who are you, and what’s the SaaS you’re working on?
I’m Marie, co-founder of Tally. I founded Tally in 2020 together with Filip, technical co-founder and partner in life. Tally is an intuitive form builder (you can just start typing as in a text document) and we offer unlimited forms and submissions for free.
How did you come up with the idea?
As makers, we struggled with finding the right tool to create forms for our previous start-ups and jobs. Google Forms is very functional but doesn’t look good, and tools like Typeform, Jotform, and Formstack make you hit a paywall very fast (and can be expensive depending on what type of form you’re building).
It is a very competitive space, but we felt like there was a place for a new type of form builder experience with a different business model.
We wanted to make form building easy, beautiful, and free without limits (so there are no limits on the number of responses, input fields, or forms). We’re also big fans of the notion’s editor approach and wanted to create a fast, seamless, and fun form-building experience where you start from a blank page and can create any type of form by just typing text or adding blocks.
How did you validate the product?
We shared our MVP for the first time with friends and family in August 2020. Our MVP was a very basic version of the form builder. You could insert questions, but that was it; you couldn't even publish a form. We didn't have a large network of our own, so we started sharing our first version of our form builder with the people closest to us.
After processing their feedback, we started with cold outreach to creators, Indie Hackers, and startup founders who might be interested in our product. We scanned Product Hunt and Twitter, made lists of hundreds of prospects, and started doing cold outreach, asking for their feedback. Often without success, but those who did take the time to reply became part of our community of early users and ambassadors.
We didn’t have a paid plan in the first months, but when users started asking how to upgrade and contribute to our roadmap, we knew we were on the right track.
Lots of cold outreach on Twitter was part of the marketing strategy.
How did you launch the product?
In March 2021 we felt ready to launch on Product Hunt. We had a small community of 1.500 users and released some of the crucial features to be able to compete with other form builders out there.
Our launch was a rollercoaster and we ended as product #4 of the day. We doubled our user base (from 1.500 to 3.000 users) after the launch and Product Hunt has been an instrumental step in gaining exposure.
We made a checklist with everything we did to prepare for our first Product Hunt launch, which you can find here.
In 2023 we launched Tally 2.0 on Product Hunt and managed to become the number one product of the day, week, month and won a Golden Kitty in the bootstrapped category. We shared more about the results of this launch here.
What were 3 ways you got the first customers to your product?
Cold outreach: We scanned Product Hunt and Twitter and made lists of hundreds of prospects and started doing cold outreach, asking for their feedback. Often without success, but those who did take the time to reply
Join relevant slack groups or communities and contribute
Scan conversations on Twitter about similar products
Reply to relevant questions on forums (Reddit, Quora, Indie Hackers...)
What is the SaaS doing right now in terms of numbers?
We recently reached $100K MRR and have 250.000 users.
March 2021: $1K MRR
— Marie (@MarieMartens) March 1, 2024
March 2022: $15K MRR
March 2023: $50K MRR
March 2024: $100K MRR
Bootstrapped from scratch and far from done,
LFG @TallyForms @filipminev!
Here’s what happened on our journey to $100K in monthly revenue, including what worked and what didn't.… pic.twitter.com/p7RnzUEyh8
What’s the best growth hack or tactic to get new customers to your SaaS right now?
We’re running a product-led business, which means user acquisition, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by our product. One of the key factors in our success and the biggest drivers of our growth has been our free product.
This is how our growth flywheel works:
Offering Tally for free lowers the barrier for people to try it out, and creates positive word of mouth.
Free users have a 'Made with Tally' badge on their forms, which turns our users into our biggest promoters and the most important lead source.
About 3% of our free users upgrade to Tally Pro, which is how we make money.
Free customers make our flywheel spin, and the faster it spins (meaning, the more free users we can attract), the faster we can grow our MRR.
Other channels that help us grow are:
Word of mouth: The best advertising is done by happy users" and happy clients help us spread the word about Tally. We offer laser-fast customer support, talk to users on a daily basis and have an open roadmap and feedback board to involve users in the decision making process.
Building in public: we’re an open startup and have been writing about our journey since day one.
SEO: we have invested in creating optimized landing pages to grow our organic traffic
What is your biggest lesson learned thus far?
It's okay to say no. You can not satisfy everyone, especially with a small bootstrapped team, but that's okay. You can't please every user and build every feature request. You need to stick to your strategy (for us, this means keeping things simple and free), focus on what works, and repeat it over and over again.
What are the 5 tools you use the most?
Notion: for documentation purposes, planning, writing
Slack: to communicate with the team and users
Figma: to create marketing material
Missive: our shared mailbox for email handling
Cleanshot: for creating product screenshots
What’s 1 book you’d recommend to fellow founders?
I’ll be completely honest here, I haven’t found the time to read books in a while. Most of my inspiration comes from following founders on X, reading stories on Indie Hackers, and talking to our users.
What’s your advice for (aspiring) founders in SaaS?
Building a business and generating revenue in a large addressable market is easier than in a niche. The demand is there, and there are more people to sell to, which makes scaling and growing easier.
With Tally, we launched in a very competitive space, but we knew that form builders have been around for decades and that every business needs one at some point. If you can claim a small percentage of this immense market, you can already be very successful.