Tally’s Bootstrapped Journey to 500,000 Users and $160K MRR
A team of 4 people did it! (and they are hiring) + checklist for a successful launch inside
As the renaissance of AI makes entry barriers as low as ever and robbs established companies out of product-market fit, it is more important than ever to learn GTM from companies that have made it “against all odds.”
Meet Tally - the simplest way to create forms for free. In four years, they acquired 500,000 users worldwide and reached $160K in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) in a rather crowded space of SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms etc.
I found their story refreshingly relatable since the cofounders are a couple (I work with my husband too), the company is registered in Belgium 🇧🇪 - there is hope for EU tech 🤠, the company bootstrapped a team of 4 experts, not another Harvard alum, prev Data Scientist at Meta Silicon Valley investment-backed wunderkind.
How cool.
But you are here to get tactical. What can you learn from Tally’s journey?
In this Substack post, we will deep-dive into some of their go-to-market secrets behind their beautiful 🏒 growth curve. You will learn some extremely tactical takeaways that you can apply to your GTM, such as:
Use manual outreach on platforms like Product Hunt, Reddit, and X (Twitter) to drive early traction and directly engage target users.
Build growth loops into your product by leveraging free-tier branding (e.g., “Made with Tally” badges) to turn users into advocates and drive organic acquisition.
Disrupt pricing norms with bold strategies like offering unlimited free features to attract users and upsell premium tiers later.
Prioritize continuous feedback loops with power users through direct channels like Slack or community forums to refine your product.
Build in public to humanize your brand, foster trust, and cultivate an engaged audience eager to support and promote your journey.
Optimize for quick time-to-value by eliminating friction in onboarding, enabling users to experience your product’s core value without barriers.
I invited cofounder Marie Martens to share Tally’s go-to-market journey. She was so generous with insights and numbers 🙏. She covered all the stages of GTM:
Let’s hear it directly from Marie:
Founding Story and Vision
Our leap into entrepreneurship during 2020 and early challenges faced.
In late 2019, I and my partner and co-founder Filip Minev decided to chase our dreams. I spent 10 years in B2B marketing, while Filip (full-stack engineer), had recently sold Delta—a crypto portfolio app he built—to eToro.
We started building a product for the growing influencer marketing industry while living as digital nomads. Our venture, Hotspot, would be a platform connecting hotels with travel influencers for collaborations. To validate the idea, we reached out to 1000 potential hotel partners and found 100 that we’re interested in the idea (using a Google Form). What started as a side project grew into an MVP by early 2020, with an increasing number of hotels and influencers joining the platform. I quit my job, and we flew to Bali, planning a stopover in Bangkok.
However, as soon as we landed in Bangkok, the pandemic struck. Countries began locking down, customers started canceling or pausing subscriptions, and flights were being canceled. After just one week, we had to return home and enter lockdown. Six months later, with no sign of recovery in the travel industry, we decided to pivot to a new project.
During a brainstorming session, we started talking about forms. We both had used various form builders in our previous roles but never found one they truly enjoyed. While Typeform was beautiful, it was too expensive—especially for indie hackers. Google Forms was powerful but lacked design appeal. Around this time, we also started using Notion and had an insight: if Notion could make note-taking fun, why couldn't we do the same for forms? Why not make forms both fun and free? That's how Tally was born.
Marie and Filip’s vision to make form-building simple, fun, and accessible.
We set out to build Tally, the simplest way to create forms, for free. We wanted to create a powerful form builder that lets anyone make any type of form without spending a fortune. We believe you shouldn't pay more just because your forms convert. So we introduced something new—a concept no one had tried before:
We abandoned volume-based pricing, offering unlimited forms and responses for free
We created a modern form-building experience—no drag-and-drop, just a beautifully simple interface that works like a text document
Stages of Tally’s Growth
1) 👫 Problem-Solution Fit: Getting the first users
Two months after starting to build our MVP, we launched into an intensive cold outreach phase. Our strategy began with our immediate network of friends and family, then expanded to Product Hunt. They identified and personally reached out to founders, designers, marketers, and product managers who had upvoted similar no-code tools. We sent thousands of messages and had a pretty high reply rate of around 10%.
This manual, custom outreach continued for 6 months. The most engaged users joined our Slack channel (which has since grown to 4,000 members), creating a tight feedback loop that guided our product development.
Key strategies we used:
Analyze Product Hunt for users engaging with similar products
Connect with established makers for feedback and validation
Actively participate in relevant Slack communities
Monitor X conversations about competitor products using Tweetdeck
Engage in discussions on Reddit, Quora, and Indie Hackers
Share our founding journey publicly to build a founder audience
2) Getting to Product-Market Fit 🚀 Launching on Product Hunt
In March 2021, we felt ready to launch on Product Hunt. We had built a small community of 1,500 users and released crucial features that would help us compete with other form builders. The launch doubled our user base from 1,500 to 3,000 users and was instrumental for kickstarting product-led growth.
This checklist contains everything we did to prepare for a successful launch.
On September 19, 2023, we launched Tally 2.0 on Product Hunt, marking three years since our initial debut on the platform. The primary objective was to attract new users and showcase the enhanced features and redesign of Tally 2.0.
It proved to be a highly competitive day, with three products each receiving over 1,000 upvotes. Despite the competition, we secured the top spot as the #1 product of the day.
Following the launch, Tally was recognized as the #1 Product of the Day, Week, and Month. Additionally, we received a Golden Kitty award for the best bootstrapped product.
Traffic and Exposure: The launch day attracted 9,800 visitors to Tally’s homepage, marking the second-highest traffic day ever at that stage for Tally. Product Hunt referrals accounted for 3,900 unique visitors post-launch, with a peak of 1,400 on launch day. Tally was also featured in Product Hunt’s Daily and Weekly Digest newsletters, as well as The Verge’s Installer newsletter, bringing in an additional 1,700 unique visitors.
User Growth: The launch led to record-breaking user signups (at that stage), with 766 new users on launch day and 785 the following day. In the two weeks post-launch, we got 4,400 new users per week, a 91% increase from the typical 2,300 weekly signups.
You can learn more about Tally’s Product Hunt launch results on our blog (screenshots and results inside): https://blog.tally.so/product-hunt-launch-results/
3) 📈Go to Market fit: Product-led growth
We run a product-led business where user acquisition, conversion, and retention are driven by our product. A major factor in our growth has been free product, which plays a central role in our success.
Today, most people discover Tally through our 500,000 users. The best advertising is done by happy users, and our satisfied customers help spread the word.
Beyond word of mouth, our product is our main acquisition channel. With Tally being largely free, free forms display a “Made with Tally” badge, boosting visibility, attracting new users, and converting them into paying subscribers.
Out of 35,000 new users a week, 40% come from “Made with Tally” badge, 30% from Search, 15% Direct, and the remaining share is a combination of Social Media (LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook), Product Hunt and occasional partnerships.
Our growth flywheel works like this:
Free access lowers the barrier to trying Tally, creating positive word of mouth.
Free users display a “Made with Tally” badge, turning them into the product’s biggest promoters.
About 2% of free users upgrade to Tally Pro, driving revenue.
Key components of our strategy include:
Simplicity: A frictionless UX, simple pricing, and clear communication.
Freemium Model: A generous free tier without trials or paywalls.
Quick Time-to-Value: Users can create, publish, and share forms without signing up or entering payment details.
Self-Service: A user-friendly interface with resources like FAQs and guides.
Virality: The Tally badge on forms spreads the product organically.
Customer Advocacy: By prioritizing customer support, happy users become loyal promoters.
This approach has allowed us to grow organically, using our product as the engine for both acquisition and retention.
Challenges and Iterations in the Scaling Stage
Scaling Customer Support
Offering a free product comes with challenges—chief among them is supporting a growing base of free users. We always chose to prioritize customer support, initially responding to Slack messages, emails, and Twitter DMs within the hour. This approach allowed us to deeply understand our users’ needs through direct feedback. However, as the user base grew, maintaining this level of personal support became unsustainable.
To scale customer support, we implemented the following strategies:
We created a comprehensive help center from scratch using Notion, documenting all answers to support tickets (check out Filip's thread if you're interested in the tech side of this project).
By keeping the product intuitive and easy to use, we minimize support requests.
The Slack group was shut down for new users as it had turned into a 24/7 chat support line.
We adopted Missive as a shared inbox tool to manage incoming queries more efficiently.
Our first hire was a customer support agent from the Tally community, bringing passion and familiarity with the product.
We launched an expert program, enabling users to engage experts for specialized assistance.
We introduced support boundaries for certain technical features (such as writing custom CSS) to limit support expectations.
We stopped replying across all channels by introducing a support ticket form (built with Tally) to streamline and qualify support requests.
We introduced a feedback board for users to submit suggestions and upvote features (which were previously tracked manually with added context).
Growing the team
When we first started building Tally, we imagined a fully remote, asynchronous team with the freedom to balance work, life and travel.
But then reality set in: running Tally demands all our energy, deep focus, and consumes every hour of the day. The dream of flexibility and travel didn’t last very long. Adding a year of pandemic lockdowns, two kids, and four years of working from home to the mix, work-life balance became almost impossible as the lines between work and personal life blurred completely.
Since our local team was just Filip and me, and we didn’t have the budget for an office at first, working from home was the default. But, in our home-based bubble, it became harder to stay productive, disconnect from work, and avoid burnout. Over time, it became clear we needed a change. Besides balancing work and life, bridging communication with our amazing remote freelancers, and building a team culture were all growing challenges.
Finally, we decided to find an office—and we discovered the perfect space at Ghent’s Wintercircus. We’ve been lucky to work with a talented pool of contractors, but with our dream office in place, we felt ready to hire an in-house team and build together in person. That’s where Wouter (Full-Stack Engineer) and Frederik (Customer Support) came in. With a small but mighty team of 4 we’re ready for our next chapter!
Battling scammers
Because Tally is mostly free with no limits on form submissions, it also attracts abusers who engage in malicious activities: creating phishing forms for example. We don't want to compromise on our free tier by introducing limits, so a growing amount of our time started going into blocking scammers and finding new ways to prevent abuse. We’ve managed to automate this process, but it still requires manual moderation to be able to keep scammers at bay.
Takeaways for GTM Strategists
Do Things That Don’t Scale: Manual cold outreach played a crucial role in kickstarting Tally’s product-led growth. Personal, hands-on efforts can make a big difference, especially in the early stages.
Talk to Your Users: Establishing a continuous feedback loop is essential. Engaging with users ensures you’re building a product and creating content that truly aligns with their needs and desires.
Prioritize User-Centric Design: Tally’s simple, intuitive approach to form building eliminates complex drag-and-drop interfaces, opting for a straightforward, text-based experience. This design philosophy enhances user adoption and satisfaction.
Adopt an Innovative Pricing Strategy: Tally disrupted the norm by offering unlimited forms and responses for free, challenging traditional volume-based pricing models. This bold move broadened accessibility and won over users.
Build in Public: Transparency about Tally’s journey helped cultivate a personal audience, foster trust, and build strong advocacy. Sharing your progress openly can create a loyal and engaged community.
Navigating the future
We’re not chasing shiny new strategies; we’re focusing on what works for us: building a tool people genuinely love to use. It may sound simple—even boring—but simplicity, a generous free plan, and a personal touch are the core values that make Tally successful.
Our vision is clear: we’re creating the simplest, most intuitive way to build forms. Instead of a “Swiss Army knife” full of features, Tally is a finely-tuned piece of software, focused on one thing and doing it exceptionally well. It’s pixel-perfect, polished, and built with the user’s experience at the center.
Moving forward we’re starting to experiment with paid marketing and community building. Tally has been powered by a passionate user-base since the start and we want to invest in our community, connect power users and nurture community-led initiatives such as content and events.
Take Tally for a spin, it’s free and I’d love to hear what you think!
Wow! This was a masterclass of GTM - right? 🤩
Thanks so much, Marie, for sharing your story, insights, and vision on the GTM Strategist Substack 🙏. If you want to keep up with Marie and Tally, follow her on LinkedIn or X (https://x.com/TallyForms, https://x.com/MarieMartens).
Tally is looking for a Community & Social Media Lead, so if you see yourself as part of their team, check out this job post.
Inspired by Tally’s GTM story, I would love to ask you for a FREE favor - I would love your inputs on how we should evolve our GTM Strategist ecosystem to serve your needs best - should we write more about AI, do a Maven cohort, launch a community, do more live events, share more GTM stories such as this one - help me decide.
I made a short survey in Tally (yes, it was free and easy 🤠) - it will take you approximately 5 minutes to fill it in. Your contribution to the GTM Strategist ecosystem will be rewarded with a $30 gift voucher for my products and, more importantly - it will mean the world to me and help me navigate some tough trade-offs for 2025. Because you and I both know - you can do anything, but you cannot do everything 🥠. Help me serve you the insights you need in formats you like:
Thank you!
Maja
I love both their tool and their inspiring journey. Hella impressive for an horizontal & bootstrapped SaaS!
This is really quite insightful, I think we run something simmilar , we share founder’s stories, tools and growth hacks on weekly basis on indieniche