How Tally bootstrapped to 60k MRR with a team of five

0:01Forums are just really boring and it is a very competitive space but then we thought if we're going to bootstrap it, it is easier to grab like 1 % of a really big market. than to grab 100 % of a small niche one. So just let's just try this. We know the demand is there and that's how we came up with the idea of building Tally. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS.com. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment and more.

0:39Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, Learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry. I'm your host, Alex Thiemann, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. Welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thiemann, CEO founder of SaaStock. Delighted to be joined today by Marie Martens, who is joining us from Belgium. Thank you so much for inviting me. Great to have you on the show. You're the CEO and co-founder of Tally. We met in March at Nathan Latker's SaaS Open event.

1:18And I remember I was sitting down having lunch. Nathan came over specifically to introduce you to me. So I appreciate that. And from there, we had a conversation. Obviously, I missed your talk at the event. You were one of the speakers. But from the context that I got of your talk, I thought, like, this could be great to get another great European founder and bootstrapper onto the podcast. since then i know we spoke last week and this weekend i'm just back from the sasnot founder member retreat which we were talking about in sunny mykonos explaining to those watching on video i've got sunburn on my nose and we did it was a funny one we were expecting like really good weather out there because i just thought may mykonos greece it's going to be beautiful sunshine a few days before one of the the mentors one of the more experienced founders that that was joining us mentioned that actually he's been to Mykonos 50 times, right?

2:09It's a lot. I think he's only early 30s, but he's been 50 times. And he said it gets very cold there, especially this time of year. And he said, make sure that you pack some winter gear. And all of a sudden, the context of the next three days totally changed. So I just packed shorts, t-shirts, sunglasses, all of a sudden, I'm getting like hoodies, gelets, jeans, everything in there. And when we arrived on the Thursday, it was freezing right there's a real wind chill there everybody was in blankets outside at lunch time and I thought oh like such bad luck that the next three days that we're not going to be in the sunshine like it mattered but didn't matter because if you the main thing was we're not there to sunbathe right but to get it helps it helps but to get 40 founders together and the forecast was terrible for the next two days but actually on Friday we woke up to a beautiful sunshine.

3:01And then we spent all day out in the sunshine. And then on Saturday, all these European founders were full of sunburn. And we weren't really that prepared. It was a really great time. And like I said, I've had 24 hours to recover. Now I'm back on the podcast and back to it. But so Mary, we've met, but I still don't know that much about you. And our founders may know, or and listeners may know even less. So let's start with the question, who is Mary Martins? Yeah, good question. So yeah, my name is Maireen, co-founder of Tally, which is a no-code form building tool, an alternative to Typeform or Google Forms, which you might know or some tools that are better known.

3:42We're based in Belgium. I'm also born in Belgium, Bruges, a very small town here. I'm 34 years old and I founded Tally together with Philippe, who is my technical co-founder, but also my partner in life. And together we have one two-year-old daughter and one son on the way, actually, who will be born, if all goes well, in October. So that's it for our family. Yeah, I was born and raised in Belgium. I've studied here as well, went to the university in Ghent, which is the city where we live now. I come from a family. My two parents are physiotherapists, so they do something completely different.

4:20But my sister, who is two years older, is active. She works at MediaMonks, which is a worldwide advertising company. So I think I got the bug for marketing advertising from her. I was always interested in media and the more creative work behind advertising. So that's why I chose to study communication sciences at university. Afterwards, started working in one of the bigger publishing firms in publishing companies in Belgium, where I was also active in the marketing team, but more like on the commercial side, like selling advertisements on websites and newspapers and magazines to bigger brands.

5:01And after a couple of years, I think six years, I decided to go work for a startup, which was a digital product studio, a smaller agency. And I guess that's where I got to learn more about building digital products and how that whole life cycle works and more the product side of things and less like the marketing side of things. And yeah, a couple of years later, I met Philip and that's where our tally and joint startup adventure started. But that's me in a nutshell. Congrats on the upcoming child due in October. Thank you. One of the only reasons that we accept that people don't attend Sastoc in October, but hopefully in 2024, you can come and bring the kids as well.

5:45We've had a number of founders. as you can imagine often founders can be like similar age like you mentioned you I think you were you're 34 right and having like small kids and we say bring them to the conference right and see and maybe there'll be future founders in the making but still to be still to be proven and your parents you say physiotherapists was there any pressure from them to follow in that path or was it kind of like total freedom you find your own way yeah no not at all the only requirement was they wanted us to go to university so they had this pretty old school view I think on you need to get your diploma and your degree so you can get a good job afterwards.

6:20Also, because that's something that they didn't do. They never managed to get like that university degree. So I guess that's something they wanted to like fix through their children. Or that was definitely something that was important in our household. But it's not that it's something that we didn't want to do. So it's not like there was a struggle about that. But there was definitely no pressure to follow in their footsteps or to do the same thing like they wanted to do. They just wanted us to have a good job and to enjoy what we're doing. So yeah, no pressure on that side, no. Yeah, just interesting and quickly on that.

6:57Yesterday, so I've got two girls, they're six and eight. We're talking about the schooling and finances and financing that schooling over the next whatever, 10 years or so. And something that I also had a lot of pressure my age to go to university and that was the path. And also my parents didn't go to university. I think it's one of these potentially generational things. But for me, now I'm an entrepreneur and have been for eight years, but now I'm an entrepreneur. I don't want to put that pressure on my kids to go to university. I want them to forge their own path and for them to have options.

7:28And we know many successful people that either have become entrepreneurs or have gone on to be a success and haven't gone to university and many that have. But I think it was almost like there was no option for me back then. This is what you have to do. And it was, yeah, it was quite a lot of pressure. I think it might be a generational thing indeed, because like for us, I don't think that anything that I'm doing now or that the university has contributed to anything that I'm doing now. So it's a bit of an old school idea. I guess we would value a lot more that our kids try their own things or go do internships or start their own small startups and get started like that instead of going to university.

8:09But yeah, that's how it went. You're a bootstrapped entrepreneur. Also, your co-founder is your partner. Any advice? I'm getting so much of this sort of these days about co-founders being married and any advice in terms of like how to make this work? Yeah, good question. I don't think we found like the perfect formula for that. It definitely got some time to get used to being like co-founders from just being partners. We didn't used to work together. When we met, we each had our jobs in different companies. It was only a couple of years after that we decided to quit our jobs. But we might come to that part later that we decided to quit our jobs and work together.

8:51I guess for us, what really helped is that we have like our own roles and responsibilities. Philip is the technical brain. He designs, he builds the product. That's something that I don't have any experience with. So he asks for my feedback, but I fully trust him on that part. And I just, I have a background in marketing, but now I'm a lot more busy with just running the startup, managing our customer support people, doing the financial side of things, trying to grow the community, like everything that is just not building or not technical, that's up to me. And he also trusts me on that part. So that kind of helps to just let go and just trust that we will do a good job.

9:34I guess for us having kids definitely didn't make it easier timing wise, but it did help to like switch off. Once our daughter comes home in the evening, there's just little time to talk about work and you have to do something else. So it helps us to disconnect and just have more family time with her. Before she was born, I think we were just nonstop 24 hours talking about Tali and working, which was also not a healthy situation to be in. In that regard, I guess maybe having a family helped us. But still, sometimes it's difficult. Sometimes you have discussions. We also try to, like during weekdays, we each have like our week evenings where we can do things separately.

10:15see friends that separately go for dinner and we do feel like we really need that because we also work together during the day so just give each other enough space and then be energized again for for the next day tell us a little bit about the founding story and then also like why create and like let's say another survey tool there certainly it's a competitive space with a lot of great examples of big companies and Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey and Typeform to name a few. So we've some great success stories. But yeah, so what's the founding story and why this survey space? So it's actually we, Talia is not the first startup that we founded together.

10:57We had this mutual dream of becoming digital nomads and traveling around the world while working on our own startup. And actually beginning 2020 for us seemed like the perfect time to do that. We didn't have kids yet. Philip had also sold his previous startup, Delta, which was something like a crypto portfolio application, something completely different. So we had a bit of a financial runway, I would say, to quit our jobs. I had worked for over 10 years, and he as well. So we had saved some money, and we decided if we want to travel and try this out, maybe this is a good time. What's the worst thing that can happen?

11:34And we had another idea, which was called Hotspot. It's actually a platform that connects hotels with travel influencers to work together against something in a very different space. And we had already built like a very simple version of it. And we already had our first client. So it was like our side project, something that we did besides our jobs. And then beginning 2020, we thought, let's just go all in on it. We feel like we can grow this. We booked our tickets. We were going to travel in Asia, live in Bali, surf and work. the classic digital nomad story. But of course, little did we know that COVID was going to hit.

12:12So the pandemic hit in March, which was just the month when we left. So we arrived in Bangkok for one week. Then everything shut down and we had to fly back. And then we were in lockdown for the next year or longer. And that also killed our first startup because we were active in travel. All the hotels closed. The hotels were the people that were paying us. It seemed for us like impossible to find new clients because the whole industry was down. So we gave ourselves a couple of months. And then in the summer of that year, we decided to brainstorm about new ideas because it seemed like the pandemic wasn't going anywhere.

12:50At first we thought, how long can this take? But it took a bit longer than we knew then. And form builders, very competitive space. But I had used a lot of form builders in my jobs, like at Marketing Manager. Philip had also used form builders before. And actually for Hotspot, we also needed some forms. And we kind of ran into the problem of we were using Google Forms because it was free, because we didn't really have budget. But it didn't look great. We couldn't really customize the forms. But it was free, so we just ended up using it. And then there was Typeform or like JotForm, but those got pretty expensive the moment you collect more responses because they have this volume-based pricing.

13:35So we thought it would be good if there's like something in between, like something free, but also pretty and that offers some premium features, but affordable for bootstrappers. and at the same time we were also using notion or started using notion and we were really charmed by just yeah the interface of the product the way that it's like this community-led growth that they managed to achieve and it's just a product you want to you want to use it right like it's so fun to use so we thought what if we can make forms fun again what if we can make a form builder that is actually enjoyable and that people like to use because forms are just really boring and it is a very competitive space but then we thought if we're going to bootstrap it it is easier to grab like one percent of a really big market than to grab 100 of a small niche one so just let's just try this we know the demand is there and that's how we came up with the idea of building tally yeah can you share in terms of like where you are now some of the data behind the company what's the revenue how many people growth etc etc yeah so we will turn three this year the first two years it was just me and philip and we are currently currently have 100 000 users worldwide and we have a revenue of getting close to 60k marar at this stage and so tally is the freemium product most of our users are using it for free and around 2 ,500 users are paying customers and are basically the ones that yeah make sure that we can keep on building the product.

15:16Congrats first of all and why did you want to bootstrap it and with the competitive market how are you positioning yourselves and you use us instead of typeform or use us instead of Qualtrics and so on? So the bootstrapping part it's something that we doubted about it a lot in the beginning we thought if we can bootstrap it and if we can do it ourselves why not it's better to do it this way after our launch we got a lot of outreach and interest from investors which kind of made us doubt is it like unambitious not to raise money and to just grow more slowly but I guess in the end we just thought about what's what's the most important thing for us now and how do we see our lives in the coming years also as a young family.

16:02So I think it was more of a lifestyle choice. Like we wanted to build like this lifestyle business where we can work on a product that we love and live from it as well, create a sustainable income for our family. And so we just decided if we can manage to do that, we don't really mind growing a bit slower and more organically, but just staying bootstrapped. And with also the idea that we have the control and we decide what we do and We can make the best decisions in the best interest of our users and not necessarily in the best interest of investors who might want to raise prices or get you faster to more revenue.

16:42So it was a bit of a combination of those things that made us decide to stay bootstrapped. Let's talk about how you got to where you are and to 60k MRR. So let's talk about, first of all, getting those first users. So you're launching the product or you have the product, competitive space. how are you getting the first users? Yeah so we didn't have a network at all in the space and we really started by just going to and this is very practical but a lot of people have asked so I've learned that it's good advice for people who are just starting out. We would basically go to product hunt and look for similar tools so as you said before there's a lot of form builders at the time there were also a lot of no-code tools being launched and still today.

17:26So we would look at like similar tools like ours, similar in functionality or similar in audience and see which people would upvote them. And then I would basically make lists like in a Google sheet until I had thousands of people. And then I would just reach out to them, would try to find their email or just their contact details. So really cold outreach and try to ask for their feedback. So I would just say, hey, we're Marie and Philippe. We've built this new tool. It would be great to get your feedback if you have five minutes to try it out. So that's what we did. And we did that like over and over again.

18:00Of course, we also tried to prioritize like other founders, people that work in product or design, people that had a larger following on Twitter, just so the chances were higher that they might try it out and maybe share it as well with their following. and we were lucky to have quite a few people respond. Of course, the response rate is quite low for this type of cold outreach, but that's how we found the first users. And those users also started joining our Slack channel, which we had from the very beginning, and started giving us feedback. And by them using it and by the product being for free, started growing from there.

18:39And we just kept on doing that until we had around 1 ,000 users. It took us a couple of months. And then, yeah, at that time, our daughter was also born. So we had a bit of a delay. And then around five months later, after building our MVP, finding the first users, keep on adding more like basic functionality to the product. We decided to launch on Product Hunt ourselves because we felt like that was a good spot for us to launch the product publicly. And that was like the first, I would say, big validation as well, because we doubled our user base. We got more paying customers like in one day and we got tons of positive feedback.

19:20So then we thought, OK, we're on to something. There is a small piece of the very large form building market that we might be able to claim here. And that piece doesn't need to be that big because we're only two people, right? We don't need the revenue that the big competitors have. Our costs are a lot lower and so on. So that's how we found the first users, how we launched it from there. you did something that doesn't scale initially which is obviously the the advice you had community-led growth baked in because you thought about the slack channel and bringing users in and getting the feedback and from that some viral feedback loops which is great and obviously this freemium strategy as well get the free users in the barriers to entry then much lower and great for a product like this seems like all the right things then launching on product you say doubling the user base tell us a little bit about launching on product hunt we see a lot of companies do it We see a lot of people don't do it.

20:13Obviously, it worked out for you. Why did you do it? What was the process? So I'm imagining you didn't say, hey, we're going to launch a product like tomorrow or next week, that there's probably quite a bit of prep that went on it. And then what was the outcome? So you mentioned in terms of doubling the user base, which is great. But also, did you get to number one on the day that you launched? Yeah, so we didn't. Spoiler. But it was a pretty eventful day. So no, it's not something we decided overnight. We prepped for it quite well because we found it really was the first time that you expose your product to this for a relevant group of people.

20:50It was our first public launch. So we waited until we had enough features to launch. We didn't launch our very first MVP on there because then we would just get a lot of feedback like, oh, it looks great. You cannot even add logic or you cannot even embed your form. And so we made sure that we had what we thought was like the basic crucial functionality to compete on some level with other form builders. So we waited for that product wise. And then we also just, we had our first thousand users, which really helped us on the day itself, because that was like, those people could also support us and upvote us.

21:28So we made sure that we had our pitch ready. We actually have a checklist of everything we did and templates on our blog, which I can share with you. So we just made sure we had all the copy. We had like social media updates. We had a newsletter prepared. We had reached out to some of our bigger fans and let them know that we are launching on that day and we would appreciate their support. We did all of that. So we made sure that we could also handle incoming traffic because sometimes when it's your first launch, you don't want the product to go down. So we made sure that infrastructure wise, everything was okay.

22:04So we did put quite a lot of prep into it and the day of the product hunt launch. So we were basically number one for 23 hours of the day. And then the last hour we lost three spots to, I don't know, I think it was something with NFTs at the time. And we ended up being product number four. And so huge disappointment on the day itself. But then you also learn that the spot is not like the most important thing. Of course, it creates some extra visibility because then they take you in their newsletter and so on. But for us, we had a lot of eyeballs and new people coming in during the day. And also the coming days, we received a lot of feedback and got a lot of new incoming users.

22:46For us, it was definitely worthwhile. We're also thinking about launching like a Tally 2.0 now, almost three years later to do that again. You have products that do that way more often, that launch like every new feature, which is also not something I would recommend. But we're definitely planning to do it again. And for us, it was worthwhile, especially because we have this product-led growth thing going on. And because Tally forms are, you can use Tally for free. And if you are a free form user, your form carries like a made with tally batch. And so that's our biggest acquisition channel. Basically our free users sharing forms with their respondents and getting in new users through their forms.

23:29And to be able to get like that flywheel spinning, we needed like the first set of thousand or 2000 users. And that's just something that we got through the cold outreach and the product hunt launch. and then after that it just started growing by itself because we had that initial set of a couple of thousand users using the product so in that regard it was definitely worth it for us to to launch but of course it depends on your product i think free products also usually do better or freemium products depends a bit on your target audience as well i think for products like ours or most sass it's definitely worth a shot yeah it sounds like going to do all the right things and that made by tally or if that was the sort of the the badge we've seen this in many other successful plg product and like type form i think as well as well made by type form they had this sort of i guess kind of viral i don't know what's the word viral loop type product well not every product can have that right not every product has that but that was a big part of their success and i think similarly companies like hop in and things like that you use the product you get the experience and then it's like hey we can do run a webinar on this or something like that so very is that something you always thought of from the beginning we need to kind of have this and you saw that also that hey the competitors have this so let's test it out and it does work we did because we because we wanted to stay bootstrapped and it was just the two of us we and we didn't have the big budgets or any budget we also realized that we cannot compete like marketing wise with the bigger players we We don't have money enough to run ads or to do any of those things.

25:08So we needed something that could grow and sell itself. So that was like, because it also just works with the viral nature of forms. So that's definitely something that we were aware of from the beginning, because we also thought that it would be difficult to scale the product otherwise without a viral loop built in and without having the big team and the bigger budgets. You decided to also make the leap from becoming two to I think you're now a team of five. Is that right? And growing? Yeah, so very recently. So we waited two years, which I think was also one of our biggest mistakes. Yes and no.

25:45Meaning that, of course, when you don't raise funds, you have less budget to hire people. Hiring people is expensive. We were very conservative in that. Like we really waited until we had enough money on the bank to hire people. and we waited a bit too long. So we got after two years. In year one, I think we ended the year with 8K MR. And then year two, we went to 30K. And it just started growing a lot faster than we could manage. And we were basically spending our full days on customer support, bug fixing, just like trying to keep up. So we didn't even find the time anymore to hire someone. Like it became that bad.

26:27And there was not really a reason why we had to wait that long. We just, it was just new to us and we were used to doing everything by ourselves. And I think that's the biggest mistake that we made. Like we waited too long. We got very stressed out. We couldn't ship any features like anymore for months. And usually we ship like something every week. So that was starting to be bad for the product as well. So I think after two years, we just decided, okay, we need help. And luckily we found our first employee, Richard, in our Slack channel, who was already helping out people. And he joined us then to help us out with customer support and just to help answer questions.

27:09Because we have a lot of free users and we also try to offer them good support, which is also one of our USPs and what kind of differentiates us from other players. Like we do try to answer everyone within the hour if it's daytime for us, which is something you usually don't get with bigger companies. And by talking to those people, we get feedback. We know what to build next. We turn them into our fans. So that really works for us. So we needed help on that front. Richard now, so that was a small half year ago, has left the company because he's starting his own business. So we now replace them with two people just to be able to cover two time zones.

27:49So we now have Jonathan and Malba who actually only joined last week, helping us on. So it's customer support, but they do everything from updating our help center, making sure that all the feedback gets to the engineers. And of course, answering to all the queries on like Slack and email. So that's, that's that. And then we also hired one engineer to help out Philip because he was still like building everything himself but he was also taking care of the more technical side of customer support so that would just became too much so now it's a team of five us two co-founders one engineer and two people on customer support only since the last couple of months and we feel like with this setup like we can we'll be good for this year and then next year we'll have to re-evaluate that yeah and what's the difference between so like you you have these 98 000 free users and yeah and 2000 paying what why would you pay what do you need to what do you get additionally how did you work out this is how we're going to set the threshold and get a paying customer versus stay stay for free so paying customers are of course yeah usually businesses and the most important feature is with Tally Pro, the paying subscription, you can remove the made with Tally badge.

29:06So you don't see our branding. You can fully customize it to your own branding, which is pretty important for companies. And then there's a couple of other features like custom domains. You can host your form on your own domain. You can send emails to your respondents or to other team members. We have payment forms, which in the free version, they have like a commission that we take. so you can accept payments without a commission. I think those are the most important features. So you mostly like customization and team collaboration as well. So you can invite team members to your workspace. And that's something that you cannot do with the free version.