How Tally Reached 11K Users in One Year

Two founders launching a travel startup at the beginning of a global pandemic and somehow that leads them to building a company that just makes better online forms?

That is the story of Marie Martens and Filip Minev, the duo behind Tally Forms.

Marie & Filip have bootstrapped Tally forms to over $1.2 million in annual reoccurring revenue (ARR) today and were able to get to $250k ARR in 20 months.

How did they do it? Well, let’s start with the two personal stories of Marie and Filip.

The story of Tally

How Tally was born

Before Tally, Marie & Filip were involved in running other businesses and other business aspects. Marie was a marketing manager at a digital product studio and Filip built a crypto portfolio app that was acquired.

Naturally, you can see there’s a good match between cofounders as Marie is the “business” cofounder and Filip is the “technical” cofounder. Do they get along though?

The answer is an emphatic yes. They get along so well that they’re actually partners in life and had a baby girl together when they were starting Tally in 2020.

Before they started Tally, they left their jobs in early 2020 and wanted to chase their dreams. The first dream was to build a platform that connects hotels & travel influencers and the second dream was to become digital nomads.

You can probably guess how well those dreams went by knowing their dreams depended on the world not shutting down in 2020. You know what happened. The travel startup was eventually shut down and they found themselves back in Belgium as COVID shutdowns occurred throughout the world.

Even though their dreams of a travel startup and being digital nomads were ended pretty quick, they still experienced one problem: form builders can be pretty bad and expensive.

Marie & Filip were using Google forms in their travel startup and realized it wasn’t a great experience building the form nor was it a great user experience. It was just “I guess this works?” for everyone.

Sure, there are some great form builders like Typeform, Jotform, and Formstack, but they’re not built for the average person, creator, or early stage startup. They’re mostly built for enterprise customers who can pay higher prices for tools.

Marie & Filip wanted to build a form tool that was easy to use and was more affordable.

The growth of Tally since the start

Tally officially launched in September of 2020 and was completely free to use for a couple months. Only one person paid for it in this period and he only did it because he loved using Tally so much. Marie made a special plan for him to spend $9 or so on Tally. According to Marie in an interview a couple months ago, that person is still on that plan.

By 2021, Tally Pro was born and that was and still is the only way Tally makes money. It’s an annual subscription for $290/year that is meant to meet the needs of advanced teams and creators. If you go through what features are still free to everyone, you can still do most things that the average person needs.

Collaborators, custom domains, removing the Tally branding, and workspaces are things that the average person just doesn’t need. A professional team though? Yes, they most likely do need those features.

In March of 2021, Tally reached $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and over 1,500 users.

When they hit that point, they ended up launching on Product Hunt and that resulted in them doubling their users to 3,000 users almost overnight. They didn’t become the #1 product of the day either. As a consolation prize, they were the #1 product of the day for 23 out of 24 hours of that day.

By October 2021, Tally reached $5,000 in MRR with over 11,000 users. Fast forward to July of 2022 and they reached over $20.8k in MRR (Aka $250k in annual recurring revenue).

The acquisition channels Tally used to grow to $250k ARR:

Cold Outreach

The first 1,500 users of Tally were almost all from cold reach by Marie & Filip. Marie has mentioned that Twitter, Indie Hackers, and Slack communities were the main way they obtained customers for a long time. They would just engage in these communities and messaged people that they thought might be interested in Tally.

Marie mentioned that most of these cold messages went nowhere. However, the ones that did do well seemed to create a flywheel in a lot of ways.

If people loved the product, they would tend to share it out and be ambassadors for Tally. This makes sense since a lot of the early and current users of Tally are creators of some sort. As Nathan Barry has mentioned in interviews, creators are an interesting customer because if you have them as customers and they love it, they don’t just share to their closest friends, they share it out to thousands of people at a time. It’s unique.

In some ways, these cold messages ended up leveraging audiences they didn’t have. It was their customers audiences, but also the audience on Product Hunt.

Marie created this amazing checklist on how to launch successfully on Product Hunt and Marie mentioned that they were messaging people on Product Hunt for months before they even launched on Product Hunt while knowing they wanted to launch there sooner than later.

A cold message on Product Hunt would lead to feedback or someone following them before they launched there.

As mentioned earlier, they weren’t the product of the day on Product Hunt when they launched but they still hit their objective of using the Product Hunt audience to grow.

Their cold messages on Twitter and Product Hunt wasn’t scalable, but it led to more scalable growth eventually. Personally, I think the amount of cold messages they sent out helped lead Tally to become a product that is consistently talked about.

When you’re a good community member and build a product that helps that community too, it’s pretty easy to talk about in those communities.

Product Led Growth

For a product to be easily shareable via word out of mouth, it has to be pretty stinking good, especially the onboarding process. If the user experience stinks out of the gate for a new user, it’s going to be difficult to keep anyone around. First impressions matter. Especially for software.

Tally seems to have nailed this.

Marie strongly believes they are able to compete in a highly competitive space (form builders) is because of their pricing model. The vast majority of the features that any individual needs is completely free, so people naturally will sign up even to just try it out.

There is a slight catch to the free accounts using Tally though.

They are required to have “Made with Tally” on all of their forms.

So, if someone is filling out a Tally form from a free user, they’re going to see that little button at the bottom of the form. If you like how the form functions and use forms for anything, naturally, curiosity takes over and you’ll click on the “Made with Tally” button.

This has turned into one of Tally’s main acquisition channels and Marie created this fantastic flywheel graphic to show how they view this button.

With just this little button at the bottom of the form, they’ve created a flywheel of growth, so that for every free user who joins Tally and shares a form, it continues to market Tally out to a wider audience without any extra work from the Tally team.

Another way to think about it: Tally has turned their free users into mini influencers and naturally helps word of mouth happen more easily.

If you’re filling out a Tally form from someone you know, it’s a pretty easy question to be like “What’s this Tally tool you’re using?”.

It’s a natural thing to ask and if the product has a great experience, word of mouth is much easier to generate.

Branded Search Engine Optimization (Branded SEO)

This leads us to the third and last acquisition channel Tally has focused on. That is Branded Search Engine Optimization or Branded SEO.

This is slightly different than your traditional SEO strategy. Typically, for SEO, the natural inclination might be that you’re creating a lot of blog content and optimizing those blog posts for particular keywords. They’re typically keywords that are just related to the problem you’re solving, but aren’t about your brand as a company.

Branded SEO is when people are searching for terms that include your brand.

Since Tally’s word of mouth is so strong, Tally has focused on making sure when you search “Tally” or “Tally Forms” that they are in those top results.

You might be thinking, does that really drive that many people to them? The answer is: absolutely.

You can see in the graphic below that currently in July of 2024, just the search term of “tally” drives over 22,000 visitors to their website according to Semrush. That term alone represents over 57% of their search visitors.

If you think about it, how many times has someone recommended a movie or a book to you and you remember the general theme of it, but you don’t remember the exact name of it.

This is the same concept.

If someone recommends something to you, many people’s natural next step is to Google it.

For Tally, they haven’t created content on their blog that’s meant to bring people in looking for a form builder.

They’ve only found ways to strengthen their domain authority which has been done by the thousands of users sharing Tally via their websites and social media accounts.

The common theme with all of these acquisition channels is that it’s clear that their cold messages were not scalable, but kickstarted a lot of their other main acquisition channels. Product Hunt and Branded SEO strategies would not have worked as well if it wasn’t for their cold messages at the beginning of their journey.

From their beginnings in September of 2020, it took Marie, Filip, and eventually a customer support hire, 20 months to reach $250k in ARR.

If you’d like to learn more about Tally, check out some of their building in public posts here.