$70k MRR within three years through product-led growth. Marie Martens shares her flywheel.

Marie Martens began building Tally three years ago. Today, she has 150,000 users bringing in over $70k MRR.

She credits her success largely to product-led growth, choosing the right market, and bootstrapping with a small team. I caught up with her to learn more. 👇

Differentiate; don't invent

James: You bootstrapped a company in a crowded space. Why?

Marie: Launching a startup doesn’t mean you need to invent something new.

In my opinion, it is a lot easier as a bootstrapped company to claim a small part of an existing market, with a validated demand, than it is to conquer a completely new industry or invent a new product or technology.

We do things in a slightly different way in an already established field. We haven't invented a new business – form builders have been around for a long time. But we decided to stand out in a big and competitive market by doing things differently.

James: What do you do differently?

Marie: We focus on differentiation in pricing and UX. And this is why our users love Tally.

Unlike most others, we don't charge you based on how much you use our service. We let you create as many forms and collect as many responses as you want for free. No hidden fees.

We've also made the process of creating forms more enjoyable with a new and user-friendly interface. Instead of dragging and dropping elements, we've made it simple – you can add blocks easily with just a few clicks, much like you might do in tools like Notion

James: And how do you leverage this, other than happy customers?

Marie: We emphasize our USPs in our marketing, as we position ourselves as the simplest way to create forms for free.

James: Let's talk more about marketing and growth.

Product-led growth (and a flywheel)

James: You're a small team and you're bootstrapping. How does this affect how you play the game against bigger competitors?

Marie: We don’t have the marketing budgets to compete with big players in the very competitive market we are active in. Product-led growth (PLG) helps us to use our own product as our biggest acquisition channel.

James: Let's dive into PLG.

Marie: Product-led growth is a business strategy and growth model that relies on your product as the primary driver of acquisition and growth. Typically the product is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, and to deliver value quickly, which is exactly what we aim for with Tally.

James: How?

Marie: It can be done through a high level of self-service, meaning that users can sign up, onboard, and start using it with minimal or no human intervention.

It also often leverages virality, where satisfied users naturally spread the word about the product to others.

James: What's a good viral PLG tactic?

Marie: Our free users carry a ‘made with Tally’ badge on their form, and because forms are viral by nature (they are meant to share with more people), we get more visibility for Tally through our free users.

James: I smell a flywheel.

Marie: Yep, this is how our growth flywheel works:

1. Offering Tally for free lowers the barrier for people to try it out, and creates positive word of mouth.
2. Free users have a 'Made with Tally' badge on their forms, which turns our users into our biggest promoters and most important lead sources.
   About 3% of our free users upgrade to Tally Pro, which is how we make money.
3. Free customers make our flywheel spin, and the faster it spins (meaning the more free users we can attract), the faster we can grow our MRR.

Acquiring the first 1,000 users

James: PLG isn't usually something that helps with your first users — how did you get them?

Marie: We got our first 10 users with cold outreach. We sent DMs to people we found on Product Hunt who upvoted tools like Tally.

From there, we reached 100 users with cold outreach plus building in public and engaging in online conversations about form builders.

To get to 1,000 customers users, we launched on Product Hunt. It doubled our user base in one day. It has been instrumental in gaining exposure.

James: Is there anything else you wish you had tried?

Marie: Creating customer stories and generating more SEO-optimized content that highlights various use cases. But it’s something we’ll start experimenting with now.

James: What didn't you do?

Marie: We didn't do lifetime deals.

James: Why not?

Marie: A lot of founders run a lifetime deal to generate early revenue to be able to further develop the product, but this wasn’t our focus when we started out. We wanted to get as many free users on board as possible to get feedback and kick off our PLG.

Plus, our product is mostly free, and the product value of our paid subscription is very low ($29/month). Lifetime deals are often offered at a significantly lower price point which didn’t seem sustainable to us.

James: So was this decision specific to Tally or are you generally anti-LTD?

Marie: I am not against lifetime deals, but I do feel like they attract a certain audience that might not necessarily match your ideal customer.

Finding product-market fit

James: Seems like you nailed product-market fit? How?

Marie: We used Superhuman's product-market fit process based on Sean Ellis' findings.

James: How does that work?

Marie: He created a customer development survey to find out how disappointed people would be if they could no longer use the product, and he developed a benchmark of 40%. The idea behind this magical number is that companies that struggle to grow almost always have less than 40% of users respond "very disappointed".

So we created a Tally survey and asked our users for feedback. When we reached 100 responses, we deep-dived into the data.

James: What did you ask your users?

Marie: We asked:

1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Tally?
2. What type of people do you think would most benefit from Tally?
3. How can we improve Tally for you?
4. What is the main benefit you receive from Tally?
5. How did you discover Tally?
6. What would you likely use as an alternative if Tally were no longer available?

Here's our template.

Bootstrapping > raising money

James: Ok, so you've got PMF. You're doing PLG. And these acronyms got you to 150k users and $70k MRR within a few years. Was that always the plan?

Marie: We began with the idea of building a lifestyle business, one we could run ourselves while traveling. The business has grown much larger than we initially imagined.

James: It's super impressive. At this point, investors are probably interested — are you considering raising money to grow even faster?

We still prefer the idea of growing at our own pace and maintaining a small team.

I am certainly not against raising money, but we made the personal decision to bootstrap and grow organically fairly early in our startup journey.

Independence also allows us to make decisions in the best interest of our users, rather than solely optimizing for profit.

James: Being bootstrappers, how did you sustain yourselves in the beginning?

Marie: We went without salaries for almost two years but had both saved up during our careers. I worked as a marketing manager in several companies for ten years before, and Filip sold his previous startup. This provided us with the financial runway needed to survive in the early years.

The difference between $5k and $70k.

James: What's the difference between running a $5k MRR business and a $70k MRR business?

Marie: The primary change is the increased level of stress, mainly because now over 150,000 people rely on our product.

We've also implemented more systems and processes. Running Tally is still enjoyable, but the nature of our challenges has shifted. We now focus more on scaling and ensuring the reliability of our services, which has slightly reduced our agility.

James: Did you have any growing pains?

Marie: We've encountered several challenges along the way:

1. Scaling Customer Support: As our user base grew, we had to figure out how to efficiently support a large number of free users.
2. Dealing with Scammers: Unfortunately, with a free product, we've had to combat scammers, which was not as prevalent when we were smaller.
3. Team Growth: While we wanted to hire senior team members, we were also committed to organic growth without external funding. This added complexity to our team expansion.

James: How do you, personally, feel now that you've reached this level of success?

Marie: I feel more confident now compared to three years ago when I started Tally, which is my first venture into startups and SaaS. While I've learned a lot and gained confidence, I've also realized the heavy responsibility that comes with running a 24/7 business.

Working with your (life) partner

James: You mentioned your co-founder, Filip, earlier. What's it like having a business partner who is also your life partner?

Marie: One of the strengths of working together on Tally with Filip is that we're both fully committed to the venture, allowing us to discuss 'work' all the time.

James: How do you make sure you don't step on each other's toes?

Marie: We've clearly defined our roles: I oversee operations and marketing, while Filip manages product development and engineering. Trust and respect for each other's expertise are crucial in making this dynamic work, ensuring that we each have distinct responsibilities.

Our complementary skills have been a significant advantage; they allowed us to postpone hiring for a while. That's another thing that made bootstrapping possible.

James: Any downsides to working together?

Marie: Achieving work-life balance can be a struggle.

We've made a conscious effort to carve out personal time in the evenings during the week. Whether it's meeting with friends or pursuing hobbies, these moments of respite help us maintain a healthy separation between work and personal life.

James: And you've got kids now too. How has that affected Tally?

Marie: We had to come to terms with the fact that we have less time and energy to put into Tally than before we had kids. We usually spend weekends together as a family, and having children definitely helps us to switch off and stop thinking about the business.

Keeping it small

James: I'm guessing that was a big part of why you grew your team.

Marie: Yeah, we grew from a team of 2 co-founders (me and Filip) to 5 people in the past year. Our engineering team now counts 3 people: Filip 🇧🇬, Ahmed 🇪🇬, and Adel 🇩🇴. Additionally, we have Jonathan 🇫🇷, dedicated to ensuring our customers' success, while I, Marie 🇧🇪, manage the operational and marketing aspects.

James: How do you manage the team?

Marie: We work fully remote and asynchronous, and use Notion for documentation and Slack for communication.

James: How do you decide what to work on as a team?

Marie: We have a public feedback board where we collect feature requests from our users. When it comes to roadmap planning we consider the effort versus the outcome. When launching something new the outcome (what percentage will actually use the feature and will it make us grow?) always needs to balance out the effort.

James: Anything you would do differently if you had the chance to build your team again?

Marie: We waited pretty long to hire and expand the team, which slowed down our development and support processes significantly, to the point where we felt like we couldn't move forward anymore.

I would probably try to hire earlier, but as we were bootstrapped we also needed to make sure that we have enough budget to hire senior people.

James: Do you think you would have grown even faster?

Marie: Possibly. But hiring does not equal growth.

James: Mic drop 💥 Ok, where can people find you?

Marie: Here's our Twitter, blog, and website.

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