Bootstrapping tally.so with Marie

Tally helps you to create forms in the simplest way possible. In this episode Tally co-founder Marie talks about the journey of Tally to $32k MRR and the hard work behind it.

Question: Online survey/form building tools is a very competitive space. What gave you the confidence to start Tally in that space?

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 just 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). For an early-stage startup or indie makers

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 no limits on the number of responses, input fields, or forms). We’re 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.

All of this brought us to the idea of creating Tally.

Question: One of the tactics you’ve mentioned that helped Tally in its journey is its customer support, providing a personal touch in customer support rather than automated replies. Would you be able to keep up with your growing user base?

Our growth is fueled by our customers, not by investors. And since we’re customer-funded, our users are our number 1 priority. In order to make our users happy we have a laser focus on customer support. We spend 50% of our time talking to our users and answering questions on Slack, Twitter, or email. We strongly believe that real-time and personal support is what helps us differentiate ourselves, and what turns users into ambassadors.

The process

The main channels through which we interact with users are Slack, email, and Twitter. Slack: Filip handles technical questions on Slack and we aim to respond within the hour. Email: we use Missive as a collaborative team inbox. I handle the first line of support and assign technical questions or bug reports to Filip. Facebook and Twitter DMs are also handled through Missive.

Next to these channels, feature requests can also be submitted through Tally forms embedded in our roadmap and our help center.

We aim to document all questions we receive and work on optimizing the structure and searchability of our help center. In the future we want to make our support content more accessible by publishing feature requests, enabling public upvoting, publishing useful Slack conversations, and creating more detailed tutorials for the technical features. However, to keep our response time short and keep a finger on the pulse of our users we will hire an extra pair of hands on this front.

Question: What was the first version of Tally like?

We started building in the summer of 2020 and showed our MVP to the world in September. Our MVP was a very basic version of the form builder, you could insert questions and 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. For months, we kept building and iterating while talking to our small community of early users.

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 (basic) features to be able to compete with other form builders out there. We wanted to cover basic form features and input types but didn’t have the possibility yet to customize forms or embed them for example. We focussed on the simplicity of our form builder and the fact that it’s free.

Question: How do you find your users? What are your marketing channels?

When you discover Tally, it's most likely through one of our 55.000 users. "The best advertising is done by happy users" and happy clients help us spread the word about Tally. Besides word of mouth, our product itself has become our biggest acquisition channel. Tally is largely free, and free users have a "made with Tally" badge displayed on their forms. This results in more visibility for our product, new users, and eventually paying subscribers. We describe how our growth flywheel works in this post.

We also build in public and share our startup journey on Twitter. Currently, our main acquisition channels are:

1. Search
2. "Made with Tally" marketing
3. Twitter

Question: Making people excited about your product is hard. How did you find your first 10 users?

We found our very first users through 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 became part of our community of early users and ambassadors.

We were also actively answering questions in no-code communities and on Twitter, Reddit, and Indie Hackers.

Around 3% of our free users convert into paying subscribers and our first paying user actually started paying before we had premium features. We drafted a custom plan for him and he’s still a Tally user today.

Question: What’s the growth of Tally look like?

We currently have 55.000 users and 32K MRR. Our revenue grows 11% MoM and our user base 9% MoM, but we expect it to slow down as we grow. We have around 45.000 visitors/month on our website.

Question: What were the challenges you faced while building Tally?

While the first 2 years were all about finding new users and doing things that don't scale, our growing user base is now presenting us with a whole new set of challenges.

Scaling customer support: as mentioned before we will hire help for customer support to keep our response time short. Keep on improving our product at a high pace: As our user base grows, more and more time goes into customer support, moderation and administration. This leaves us with little time to spend on actually building and improving the product. We are planning to hire an engineer to help out Filip on the product front so we can keep on delivering on our promise to build the simplest, yet most powerful form builder out there.

Keep scammers at bay: 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 goes into blocking scammers and finding new ways to prevent abuse.

Question: If Covid didn’t hit, do you think you would’ve built Tally with your co-founder?

That’s very hard to say. We launched another startup before Tally, but in a completely different space (Hotspot: a marketplace that connects hotels and travel influencers).

We’re very happy to be active in the no-code space now and can relate a lot more with our (tech) audience than we did with our previous startup. But who knows, maybe Hotspot worked out if it weren’t for Covid and we would have never ended up building Tally.

Question: From your experience, what advice would you give somebody starting their ventures?

Some financial advice

make sure you have the financial runway to pay your bills for at least a year. We had worked and saved up for over 10 years and Filip had sold his previous startup which gave us the financial space to jump into a startup adventure.

The art of persisting.

Every day, I'm replying to emails, answer questions, and write help docs and Filip is coding and helping users out non-stop. Life as a bootstrapped founder sounds more glamorous than it is, but every dollar you make will make you insanely happy.

Don't be afraid to ask.

Every problem you encounter has been solved by someone else before you. There's always a great community out there that wants to see you succeed and will help you out. So, just ask!