How a NoCode form builder reached $8500 MRR in a crowded market📃

Listen Up! IH - Episode 36

“Be patient, don’t be afraid of doing the drudge work, and be ready to pivot when you need to.”

👆 That’s Marie Martens’ advice to aspiring Indie Hackers.

Marie is the co-founder of Tally.so.

Tally is a No-Code tool to build simple online forms to collect feedback, information, and even payments.

It’s a Belgium-based startup founded by Marie and her partner Filip.

Tally closed the year 2021 at $8.5K MRR.

With more than 1 million submissions captured by forms built on Tally in 2021, their growth has been enviable -

2021-graph.001_Tally.jpeg

There’s a lot to learn from Tally’s story👇

Hotspot: A COVID Fatality🙄

Marie and her partner Filip loved traveling and wanted to build a startup in the travel industry. And they were fascinated by the idea of living the life of a digital nomad.

Influencer marketing was taking over the travel industry with many hotels and tourist destinations offering free perks to influencers to get marketing for their business.

That’s where the idea for Hotspot was born- A platform for influencers to find hotels where they can trade perks for marketing.

This was in a pre-pandemic world.

The idea excited them so much that when Filip got an exit from his previous crypto startup Delta, Marie quit her job in marketing and both of them booked a flight to Bali, with a stopover at Bangkok.

But when they arrived in Bangkok, the pandemic hit and they couldn’t travel further.

They had to return back to Belgium and continue working on Hotspot from home.

By this time hotels had started to pause their subscriptions, flights were getting canceled, travel was halting across the world.

6 months into the pandemic, building features and creating content, Marie and Filip realized that the end to COVID was nowhere near. And it wouldn’t make sense for them to keep working on Hotspot.

They didn’t have full-time jobs, and they had already gone 6 months without any revenue. They had to pivot to something else.

Scratching their own Itch🥲

During their work at Hotspot, Marie and Filip had used Google forms multiple times to collect information from their users.

They weren’t impressed by the Google forms experience.

During COVID, they had organized a fundraiser for healthcare workers in Belgium. For the event, they had to extensively use Google forms again.

And again, they were not satisfied with the form building experience.

The alternatives like Typeform and Jotform were not feasible for indie makers like them because they quickly hit paywalls on those tools.

That’s where the idea for Tally was born - An easy to use form builder that’s affordable to small businesses and indie hackers.

Tally: The Product📃

Marie and Filip are big fans of Notion, and love its simple yet functional UX.

So they wanted to build the Notion of form builders.

Tally’s value prop -

Fast, simple, easy to use.
Quickly integrate with other sites and tools. (Without code)
No limits on the number of forms or the number of responses collected.

Tally’s ideal customer -

Indie Hackers.
NoCode makers.
Startup founders.
Every business needs forms!

Tally’s business model -

All basic features are free.
Collect 5% commission on free forms that collect payments. (only 1% of their revenue is through this channel, and it doesn’t count towards their MRR)
Charge $29/month for premium features like collaboration, custom domains, partial submissions, inject scripts.

Initial Users and Validation✅

Tally got its initial users mostly through cold outreach.

Marie and Filip reached out to their friends and family members, co-workers at their former jobs, and got some validation.

They sent cold DMs and emails to reach out to people, requesting them to use their product and give feedback.

Most people ignored them, but some did try out Tally.

And they gave positive feedback about the user experience. This gave Marie and Filip confidence in the product.

Marie has a background in marketing, so she was able to focus on the idea validation and growth side of the business, Filip is a developer and focused on building the right product.

They could divide their work 50:50 between Product and Marketing.

Community Led Growth👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Very early on the founders of Tally created a private slack group with their early users. This move helped them in getting quick user feedback and focusing on the right features to build.

Their users literally helped them build the product, here’s how Marie describes it -

“From design improvements to helping us out with integrations or referring us to the right person, our users have a bigger network and a lot more knowledge than a small team of 2”

Apart from this, they found users from No Code communities. They got good traction from the NoCode France community.

They are a small team, building in public and sharing their journey openly on Twitter. This helps them gather support and help from a wide range of users.

This especially helped when they launched on Product Hunt in March 2021. They followed a strategic approach with the PH launch and managed to be #5 Product of the day.

The successful launch brought in more eyeballs on the product, more supporters, more users, and even a few potential investors!

Typeform’s Loss

Tally’s satisfied users are their biggest advocates.

Back in June 2021, when Typeform raised its prices, it went out of reach of most people in the indie maker community.

By this time Tally had a thriving userbase which was openly advocating for it on Twitter -

https://twitter.com/felix12777/status/1402774962230816768

https://twitter.com/d__raptis/status/1402906928389439489

Product Led Growth⚒️

Tally benefits from the Hallmark card effect that many SaaS products are able to leverage for their growth.

This means that the very act of using the product leads to the growth of the product, much like a greeting card from Hallmark.

99% of Tally’s users are on the free plan.

And when they create a form, a badge at the bottom says - “Powered by Tally”

10% of new users come in by clicking on that badge.

Advice for other founders🤗

Marie and Filip’s journey has been full of ups, downs, and pivots. But the fact that they are able to make a dent in a crowded market should inspire us all with our own bootstrapped projects.

Marie’s advice to founders -

“Have patience, lot of the days, when you’re not growing, can get demotivated very fast. Be at it over and over again every day. Life as a founder is a lot less sexy than people think it is. At one point we were sending 100-200 DMs a day to people, results started showing late.”

“Be patient, don’t be afraid of doing the drudge work, and be ready to pivot when you need to.”

Key Lessons from Tally’s journey🧑‍🏫

Growth Strategies📈

Let’s Recap Tally’s growth strategies -

Community-Led growth - Private user community, No-Code communities.
Product Led growth - “Powered by Tally” banner on every free form.
Build-in Public - Having an active blog and Twitter presence, sharing their behind-the-scenes numbers and lessons with the rest of the community.
Product Hunt Launch - being categorized in the NoCode category on PH meant Tally became a legit NoCode tool and could ride the NoCode movement.

Useful Insights📊

Insights that indie hackers can apply in their own business. (These are also patterns that repeat in multiple indie hacker success stories.)

Keep your onboarding experience seamless, users should be able to use the product with as little friction as possible. No signup, No CC required. ( like Carrd)
Product Hunt launch matters a lot if your ideal customers are other makers. (Check out Tally’s PH launch checklist.)
Early user feedback is priceless. Speak to them as much as possible, create a private group with them. (like Hypefury.)
Tally got traction from the NoCode France community. If you can, then pivot your positioning to ride the NoCode movement (Like Bannerbear.)
Leverage Product Led Growth - ****Hallmark card effect. The act of using the product should promote the product. ( Like Riverside)
Figure out a way to divide Marketing and Product responsibilities between co-founders. (Like Veed)
When a big player changes strategy, there’s a void in the market that indie hackers can pounce on. Tally benefited from Typeform’s price change. (Tuple benefited from Slack acquiring screenhero)

Traffic Channels🔢

Tally received 661K views over the last 6 months-

Out of this, 60% of their traffic is direct, 17% referrals and 13% is social.

This combination is an indication of strong word-of-mouth marketing.

Out of their social traffic, 42% is from Twitter and 27% from LinkedIn

Landing Page Lessons📃

Let’s see what we can learn from Tally’s landing page - tally.so

Clear value proposition - It addresses the pain points of its users upfront in the first line. And addresses the competition as well.

The copy says - “The simplest way to create forms”. This takes on Google forms.

The subtitle emphasizes that the tool is free. This takes on Typeform and Jotform.
Use without signing up - The first Call to Action on the page is to create a form - which is exactly why the user is here. This feature is available even before signing up. You sign up only after you have created a form.
Excellent use of GIFs - Each GIF clearly explains how the tool functions. This is better than both an image and a video.
Use of Personas - The landing page shows 6 user personas and the use case that each may have for Tally. This is powerful and connects well with the users.
Consistent Visual Language - Good use of visuals to highlight use cases, a lot of white space makes it easy to understand - This is consistent with the visual language of the tool.

Related Trends & Opportunities💸

The subreddit r/nocode has grown well over the last 12-18 months -

If you’re looking to build a NoCode tool, going through this subreddit and the discussions there might help.

An interesting discussion in this subreddit - What sucks the most about current nocode tools?

Couple of answers to learn from -

How a NoCode form builder reached $8500 MRR in a crowded market📃 | Tally

“Be patient, don’t be afraid of doing the drudge work, and be ready to pivot when you need to.”

Hotspot: A COVID Fatality🙄

Scratching their own Itch🥲

Tally: The Product📃

Initial Users and Validation✅

Community Led Growth👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Typeform’s Loss

Product Led Growth⚒️

Advice for other founders🤗

Key Lessons from Tally’s journey🧑‍🏫

Growth Strategies📈

Useful Insights📊

Traffic Channels🔢

Landing Page Lessons📃

Related Trends & Opportunities💸

Related Links🔗