Our bootstrapped form builder turned 2 and we reached $30K MRR
by Marie MartensIn October 2020 we launched our no-code form builder Tally. Today, 2 years later, we are still a proudly bootstrapped team of 2 co-founders with a profitable business funded by the subscription fees paid by our users.
We share our love for Tally with a passionate community of over 50.000 creators worldwide and just recently reached the $30K MRR milestone!
On our second birthday we are beyond happy with our journey so far. In this post we'll look back on what we've learned and the challenges ahead of us.
https://blog.tally.so/year-2-bootstrapping-our-saas-to-30k-mrr/
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First time I tried Tally forms, I was blown away by the simplicity and the novelty of the form creation UI. I didn't believe someone can build a profitable business in forms where Google Forms are free. May be not a VC funded unicorn, but surely a profitable bootstrapped business. Way to go! Wish you all the very best for the times to come.
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Hi Yash, thanks a lot for the kind words about Tally, really appreciate it!
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Amazing!! Congrats 🎉
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This is super impressive, Marie. Congratulations!
Next up: 50k 🚀-
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Thank you Phillip!
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Just curious to know how did you get your first 10-100 customers? Should one focus on only cold DMs/emails? Or should one also start with SEO/content marketing?
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We documented our first year in this blog post. First users were mainly through cold outreach https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
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Congratulations on your success. What is your tech stack and how long did you take to build it?
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Thank you! 🙏
Tally is made with TypeScript, React, Next.js, Styled Components, Express, and runs on GCP's Cloud Run.
It took us about 2-3 months to ship our MVP.
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wow!
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Wow, congrats! You're inspiring me to keep going!
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Congratulations, the product looks straight fire!
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Well done Marie. Really love the simplicity of using Tally. Super!
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Congrats Marie!
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Good Job Marie. 🚀💪⚡️
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This is really inspiring Marie. I just spent 30 minutes reading a lot of your blog on how you guys grew Tally.
Amazing to see you bootstrap to $30K successfully. Congrats! 🥳
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This is super impressive, Marie. Congratulations!
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Congrats! What was the efforts you put in ? I'm especially curious how you did it?
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Thanks! We describe the different milestones on our blog and the first year in detail in this post https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
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God I love this. Thank you so much for sharing the journey, it's so useful for someone like me to read about how a great product like this is formed.
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So glad to hear it's useful!!
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Very impressive - and likely worth quite a high multiple of that in a strategic acquisition!
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Maybe one day ☺️
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Curious, how did you push it forward when it was at really really low revenue? How did you finance that?
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We wrote about the beginning of our startup journey together in this blog post: https://blog.tally.so/how-we-quit-our-jobs-to-work-on-our-startup-lost-half-of-our-clients-decided-to-pivot-and-ended-up-building-a-no-code-tool/
We financed the first year or so with our savings. We did everything ourselves, so we needed to cover only our living expenses.
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Just tried to connect with via your say hi link in your post but it’s broken :( I mean email isn’t right there. You might want to fix that
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You can reach us at [email protected]!
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Oh, good catch! That's fixed now.
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Congrats Marie! Last year, I used Tally and loved it; I even recommended it to a few colleagues. I'll need to use Tally again soon, keep up the amazing work!
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Thanks a lot for spreading the word Frederico!
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Hey, thanks for sharing this! I'm also super glad that you have the rest of your journey documented.
Question. Without a doubt, hitting 30k in MMR is very impressive. I read about the early months and years of Tally. Do you feel that it's harder now or harder to start? Once the ball is rolling how have the challenges changed?
Thanks!
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Thanks! The challenges are changing as our user base is growing:
- Scaling customer support (we will hire our first employee)
- Scammers are also finding their way to our product as it's free and we need to find ways to block them (which takes a lot of time)
- Keep on improving the product (will hire help for engineering as well)
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Thanks for your reply! If you need any help on the engineering side, let me know!
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Thanks for useful content!
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I guess you meant to add a link to your blog post, too?
https://blog.tally.so/year-2-bootstrapping-our-saas-to-30k-mrr/Regards from a happy contributor to your MRR
Torsten
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Haha indeed, thanks Torsten! 🙈
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@MarieMartens Congratulations! 🎉
what is your business churn rate?
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Around 7%. Higher than average, also because:
- Customers don’t live in our product
- Form builder is often used for 1-off projects
- We don’t have an enterprise offering with multi-year deals
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yes, you can save more of your revenue with the Churnfre tool it is helping business to reduce their churn rate.
This tool has saved our 24% churn rate in the last 30 days. You must visit this site to reduce your business churn. They are offering 14 day free trail.
https://churnfree.com/
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Huge congrats! 🎉
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Between the two of you, how did you balance marketing and developing?
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I'm behind the developing and Marie the marketing. We can both focus on our areas of expertise. ☺️
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Congrats! Love your blog btw.
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Many congratulations.
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Thank you!
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Congrats Marie! What are your user acquisition channels?
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It's mainly product led growth (our free forms carry a 'made with Tally badge') and we found our first users through cold outreach and building in public. I wrote more about that in this post https://blog.tally.so/how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-10k-mrr/
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Cool story! I have used Tally also, and followed you on Twitter. 👋
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It is amazing!
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Congrats! What was the efforts you put in behind the success? I'm especially curious how you differentiated from folks like typeform.
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Thank you!
Our main USPs are our business model and UX:
- We offer unlimited forms and responses for free (so no volume based pricing like you would see with Typeform)
- We don't have a drag&drop interface, but Tally works like a text editor where you can just start typing and insert blocks with your keyboard (similar to Notion)
We wrote more about what we believe are the main ingredients for our growth in this post, hope you find it useful! https://blog.tally.so/how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-10k-mrr/
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Sweet! 100% agree with going with the product-led growth.
Learned a lot from the blog you shared, thank you!
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Awesome!!
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Congrats! That's amazing
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Thanks a lot Dylan!
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Wow! Amazing!!!
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Thanks!
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Congrats (again)! Love Tally and love your blog!
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Thank you Nico!
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Well done and congratulations...what has been your biggest learning over the last 2 years to find new customers.
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Our product is our biggest acquisition model (Product Led Growth), so offering Tally largely for free with a 'made by Tally badge' helps us find new users for Tally. I described the process in here if you would be interested in reading more about it https://blog.tally.so/how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-10k-mrr/
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Thanks and this is a great way to help virality.
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I loved your episode on the IH podcast. Hopefully my girlfriend and I can follow a similar path 😆 Huge congratulations to you and Filip!
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Thank you! Which project are you working on?
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I'm currently working on MentionFunnel by myself, but trying to get her involved in some capacity (or for her to come up with a cool idea we can work on together) 😄
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Awesome, I'll have a look!
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