From Failure to $100K/Month in 5 Years

Marie Martens is the co-founder of Tally, a form builder app that she launched in 2020 with her partner Filip Minev 🚀

She recently tweeted…

March 2021: $1K MRR
March 2022: $15K MRR
March 2023: $50K MRR
March 2024: $100K MRR

Bootstrapped from scratch and far from done.

💬 In her own words…

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.

They make money by offering pro features like teams, workspaces and custom domains.

💡 How Marie and Filip came up with the idea…

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).

On validation and initial traction…

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…

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.

Building on the initial momentum 👇

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.

The free version of Tally comes with a little branding which surely helps them with exposure. Looks like each free form also links back to the Tally website, which is great for SEO 😎

Marie says about 3% of their free users eventually upgrade to Tally Pro.

She also has some advice that goes against the “riches are in the niches” approach many people recommend…

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.

Also interesting to hear that Tally was born out of a crisis…

In 2019, we launched Hotspot, a marketplace for hotels and travel influencers, but when COVID hit we quickly lost half of our clients. A couple of sleepless months later we decided to pivot, and Tally was born.

Here they are, 5 years on from a big business failure, earning more than $1 million per year in a crowded market 💪