30k users with $0 marketing spend. How we're growing Tally 👇
Hi IH 👋
In the summer of 2020 me and my co-founder Filip decided to start building the simplest way to create forms, for free. We wanted a simple, yet powerful form builder that allows you to create any type of form without breaking the bank.
We just reached 30.000 users (and $17k MRR). Tally is a freemium product, we offer 99% of our features for free, combined with a small subset of paid features for teams and companies (Tally Pro).
We entered a very competitive market and as a bootstrapped team of 2 we don't have the marketing budgets of the big players out there. So this is how our growth flywheel looks like:
Here's how it works:
- Offering Tally for free lowers the barrier to try it out, and creates positive word of mouth.
- Free users have a 'Made with Tally' badge on their forms, which turns them into our biggest promotors.
- About 3% upgrades to Tally Pro, which is how we make money.
Curious to hear your thoughts on freemium models!
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How did you initially make people aware of the product?
Mostly cold outreach, but this post describes every step of getting our first users https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
Really cool. I think cold outreach is a blindspot for a lot of founders but an incredibly powerful way to get your first users. Just lots of work! (That last part actually inspired me to start working on a lightweight prospecting tool as my next project).
Thank you, Marie, for writing this up. It's so helpful for me as I'm just starting out with my new project newsbundler.com .
I will use cold outreach to newsletter authors who will use my tool. Additionally, I use a free email course (also publishing it as a free ebook), and I will pitch News Bundler to press reporters and bloggers who write about the media industry.
Therefore, your cold outreach script is so valuable, thanks again for sharing!
Matthias
P.S.: We already met in a podcast, remember? :-)
How do you manage the costs of the free users?
We spend around 50% of our time (team of 2) on customer support (for free and paid users) and the costs to run Tally are relatively low. I shared a breakdown of our monthly costs in this thread, it's a bit higher now and doesn't include our salaries, but I hope it gives you an idea https://twitter.com/MarieMartens/status/1458452712677314565?s=20&t=e56oTTwNBo2ZwbVQ7uZZVw
thanks for sharing this. I am curious why do you use both Ghost and Super?
We use Ghost only for our blog and we used to use Super for our help center (in the very beginning) but we rebuilt it ourselves now.
Seconded - curious how you managed those costs
3% conversion rate is pretty good! Did you make something special to reach that level?
Thanks! We don't really push users to convert, just trying to provide a lot of value for free without pushing
curious as well.
This is super impressive! Your growth reminds me a lot of the early days of canva and how they monetized.
Your organic growth is super impressive!
Thank you Heleana
Inspired by your story I shared what we've been building at Videodeck. :)
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/we-turned-our-video-production-side-project-into-an-8k-mmr-productized-service-in-just-3-months-021d0b8c83
Not as impressive as Tally's growth haha.
This is interesting. Could you share how you found your first 5 users?
Hi @MarieMartens, congrats on such an achievement. I agree with @svr8, it would be interesting to know how you got your first users :)
Sure: https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
Whoa This is as exciting as the details put up. Thanks a lot!
I love this growth model where the "customers" of your customers, become your actual customers! :)
Nice to see the freemium model working as expected.
Also helps to have a product thats just as good, and infinitely cheaper, than the "primary" competitor .... :-)
thanks for sharing. How do you guys spread information about your app in first days?
It was mainly cold outreach (sending lots of DM's) in the first months. I described how we got our first users more in detail in this post that might be helpful https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
thanks, will look at it.
wow, it's amazing, congrats for the milestone Marie. btw tally have an outstanding UI, love it, did you guys build it yourself including the css?
also thanks for the blog, it's a valuable lesson, bookmarked it already :)
Thanks a lot! My co-founder Filip is the technical and design brain behind the product. He's a full stack engineer and builds the product by himself.
Wow, he's amazing
Nice product! can you please tell a bit more about the technology? what editor did you use? what's powering the frontend? I'm asking because a couple of years ago I have built txtform.com a very similar product (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xSsTr6984&ab_channel=OronOgdan-Adam) although yours is much nicer and didn't have the stamina to bring it to market :-(, again well done, nice to see it was a good idea after all :-)
Sure! Tally is made with TypeScript, React, Next.js, Express, and runs on GCP's Cloud Run. Feel free to ask my technical co-founder Filip for more details
I'd be curious to know your churn rate. How many TOTAL users do you have and how many of those arent going to a paid plan?
30.000 is our total amount of users, we have around 650 paying users and our monthly churn is around 8% (hasn't really stabilized yet). It's relatively high for SaaS, but from our understanding it's not uncommon for form builders (lots of project base usage)
The real questions !
...and we're one of your 30k users: https://funden.app/investors/apply
Well done guys, keep it up!
Thanks for the support Daniel!
I absolutely love this. I'm a Tally user myself! I would love to know what acquiring your first set of users looked like. Friends, family, coworkers I assume, then what?
Looking forward to continuing to follow your journey!
Second this
edit: there's a linke blog entry a little down below that covers some parts of it: https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
Tally is an awesome product, I use it on my site for feedback forms!
How did you get your first few users, to get the flywheel spinning?
That's great to hear Jasper!
I made a recap of everything we did to get our first users and launch on PH. Hope it's helpful!
https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
Really enjoyed reading that blog post. Thanks for sharing, Marie!
Hey there!
Have you ever heard of social listening? It basically listens to the internet. We use that internet chatter to create "lookalike audiences" that are more likely to be interested in your brand and ultimately lead to more growth and subscriptions.
If that sounds cool, check it out :D
https://hypercrowd.carrd.co
Congrats!
By the way, may I ask what tool do you use for the video on https://tally.so/ home page?
I found the video quality is pretty good and the video size is very small
Thanks! We use CleanShot for screenshots and captures
Thanks a lot!
Love the site, the design is simple and elegant!
OMG you made my day
iam so impressed i really needed that energy cause we are team of 2 people too and just finished making our dev agency and we are planning to make a SAAS too keep going
So happy to hear that! Best of luck on the SaaS!
Love the insights. Been a fan for a while now!
oh that's impressive! read in the comms you used cold outreach to get people know you. will definitely use the tactic for our launch!
You guys doing a great job. Honestly, just found your product on one of your client's website this week by clicking a tiny label in the corner. Right now considering Tally over Typeform for the future projects, thanks to you guys🙌
That's awesome to hear Levi, thanks a lot for your support!
Freemium works well for Tally because you're costs seem to be relatively low. Having higher expenses, this would be hard as costs increase heavily in parallel to free users.
@MarieMartens Have you relied on freemium since the start? I'm also wondering what's your ratio of B2B/B2C customers?
Hi Alexander, yes we've been freemium from the start. We launched completely free and introduced the first Tally Pro features after a couple of months. We don't have an exact view on B2B vs B2C because we currently only ask for name and email when you sign up (for free). Our Tally Pro users are mostly B2B
Great story Marie, very inspiring but mostly its helpful. Your blog posts which gives insight into the early stage startup going from zero to paying customers is really helpful and appreciated. Thank you. I look forward to reading more about Tally's journey. Cheers!
So happy to hear you found the blog valuable! Would love to write a bit more, trying my best to share our learnings with the IH community!
Well make that 30,001 users as I just signed up! Love reading about the journey of Tally! I believe freemium is the way to go. As a user I don't remember the last time I used a paid service that didn't offer a freemium version! Looking forward to the future for Tally as a new user!
Freemium models and long trial are the best options for product discovery and success. Simply because today's customers needs to understand the value of a product for them before even thinking paying for it.
30,000 users in that time is impressive. period. woot woot!
My thoughts on freemium is to be mindful of conversion, usage, churn and your monetization strategy. Knowing/having a benchmark for each is important. As you know, many people sign-up for free services/apps purely out of "curiosity". Many argue a barrier to entry, even if its $2/month, will drive users who truly have a problem to solve and then no one can claim the 30,000 is a vanity metric (which I don't think yours is btw).
If I focused on one of those 4 aspects right now, it would be conversion. Through customer development and data on usage, many freemium products can find that tipping point of features / access that gives enough value to the free user for them to commit to a paid subscription.
Congrats! Inspiring!
Thanks for the feedback Rocky!
Hi! Amazing product, we gonna use it for sure!
Quick question: what is tech stack of your blog? https://blog.tally.so/
Is it no-code or something else?
Cheers
Thanks! We use Ghost for our blog
https://ghost.org/
Camplong.com merupakan sebuah situs yang spesifik membahas pariwisata. Anda bisa mendapatkan berbagai informasi pariwisata dan pantai terbaik di dunia untuk mendukung program liburan Anda
Ty for the topic!
Hi @MarieMartens,
First of all, congrats on your success. I wish Tally grows bigger and more successful. I'm also a part of a budding Saas team. And, we can surely follow this model of yours. Can you share your marketing stories that you have implemented to grow Tally in its very budding stage? Thanks in advance...
Thanks a lot! We recapped everything we did to launch Tally in here https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
And...shared this awesome story through my social media channels...and I'm happy...I did that..
Hi MarieMartens,
Thanks for sharing it. I'm here to learn from great minds like you...
Just get em' onboarded. Congrats @MarieMartens!!
Amazing Marie, congrats.
Very inspirational for someone like me :)
Have you considered moving to trials?
Hi Kirill, not really. We don't get a lot of requests for it, and we feel like the freemium model fits better for us.
I like the idea of freemium products
nice one
Good, good
Looking Great
Hi Marie, congrats on achieving your 30K + $17K milestone, incredible. Am very inspired by what you two (with young baby Lucy) have achieved so far!
Thanks so much for sharing your numbers and the tips your guys have picked up along the way. Your blog is awesome.
I've plenty of questions around the Freemium model. Hmmn, will be experimenting with this in the weeks ahead. Let's see. Will let you know if I learn anything.
Until then, I'll have to find some time to try the Tally PMF survey on my existing app.
Thanks again and kudos!
Thank you Chris! Let me know if you need help with the PMF survey!
Good day,
Congratulations on your success and may many more come on your way.
I am Kristofer Lazona from Spearhead.ph an Award-winning Digital Marketing Agency featured on CNBC, Fox News Etc. and I have been personally following your post updates, and would like to know if you guys would spare some of your valuable time to co-create content with us to be featured on our pages. A small list of quick tips and insights would be great. Please shoot me an email if your interested.
Thanks and More Blessings.
Marie, it's cool that you shared this. It's even more delightful that you have such a cohesive duo!
I haven't used Tally, but your post piqued my interest.
At my company, we are in our first release creating a chatbot builder. Perhaps your team would be interested in collaborations - I'd be happy to chat
Link to us http://Inqoob.com
Hey Marie. Thanks for sharing this. Curious what was the major differentiating factor which convinced customers in the beginning since you mentioned that your market was quite crowded?
Thank you Goutham! I would say the product being largely free and our Pro offering being a lot cheaper than competitors
great
Providing value to people will always be the most beneficial strategy of all!
Thanks for being transparent. The main takeway - provide value to people.
This will serve as an inspiration to many people.
Congratulations @MarieMartens! 🙌
Thank you for sharing your story. There are a lot of valuable tips in your blog articles.
I've just signed up for Tally. The product looks awesome!
The only thing that seems false is the statement that 99% of features are free. In reality, it looks more like 60-70%. Looking at your comparison pages, it's 22 free features vs 11 pro features. This is still great. You are giving a lot of value for free. It's just my BS detector that went on seeing the 99% statement. 😉
Hi Lukasz, the 99 is more a figure of speech indeed, but our comparison pages don't include all our features and input types (only the relevant ones to compare). But something to take into account when we redesign our website, thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for your reply.
Best of luck with further growth! 🙂
'Made with Tally' Is such a smart move! I even read somewhere, that Loom.com used - and is still using - similiar strategy to drive large amounts of users. Very smart and congrats :)
btw. I saw one of your articles and I must say that from UI it looks really good! I am a web designer and I have a "fetish for a good typography" and when I saw the way you guys used Inter font - very smart choice! :)
Thank you Tom! Means a lot coming from a web designer!
This is exactly what I'm doing with my new product limey.io!
Curious what you did to get the main traction going? How did you get the first 100-1,000 users?
Hi Edan, congrats on Limey! Hope it's going well.
Mostly cold outreach to get a first audience before we launched on PH, which was the first push in growth. I share more about getting our first users here https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
I'm curious to know more about your audience. I have a hunch that this type of marketing appeals very much to certain professional audiences who might be turned off by traditional marketing. Devs for example.
Your landing and product look amazing! How much time took you to be profitable?
Tally as a product was profitable quite fast (as our costs are low), but that doesn't include our living costs. We only started paying ourselves a (small) salary this year (so around a year after launch).
Well done, the best thing about spending zero on marketing when you start is that it doesn't become a crutch that you rely on, and obviously reduces the cost of acquisition to zero. SEO is super important as your organic traffic is free, combine this with a freemium offering and its really potent (its exactly what we did at Total Car Check).
That's so true!
Interesting business model! And a great app, I love Tally
Thanks Ty! 🙏🏼
Hi Marie, thanks for sharing! I was actually listening to your IH podcast episode yesterday (again). It's very motivating! I'm currently trying to find the balance between features and pricing with my new app I'm developing, in addition to getting my first users. How did you go about growing your user base, especially early on?
Hi Daniel, so happy to hear you found the podcast helpful! We got our first users mostly through cold outreach, I described it more detailed in this post https://blog.tally.so/year-1-how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-11k-users-and-5k-mrr/
How to differentiate yourself when you are working in semi saturated or saturated market? Competitors can easily copy features within 3-4 weeks so only thing remains is pricing.
Pricing is the biggest USP indeed for us, we don't have the marketing budgets of the big players, so have to position ourselves differently. Besides this our product is very simple and we have a laser focus on customer support. I shared more about these tactics in here https://blog.tally.so/how-we-bootstrapped-tally-to-10k-mrr/
Marketing 😎
No, but in all seriousness, you're right – features can be easily copied. Your brand (style, tone of voice, market you're serving, etc) or more generally your products' marketing and positioning are much harder to copy.
Keep in mind too that the internet is a huge place. Even in a saturated market (e.g. form builders), there are plenty of humans that need a product like that.
What Tyler said 😉
How many staffs do you have now?
We're a team of 2 co-founders
This nice product compeleted by 2 co-founders. You're excellent.
I think you have a really strong value based model. Be what they really need and they will turn into becoming a customer eventually. I think this is how it should be as well. People should love and trust the software they use and they becomes keepers. Fantastic achievement. Wish you all the best and further success.
Couldn't agree more, thanks a lot Arun!
You're a motivation for every start-up who has a freemium product 🙌 Wish you to continue like that!
Wow 🥺, that's too kind Justin!
I love the low friction demo of Tally on the landing page. It demonstrates how easy to use the service is while gently prompting users to sign-up. What is your free tier sign-up rate?
I don't have exact numbers on unique new visitors, but we estimate it around 8%
Who doesn't love a good flywheel. Well done.
3% seems relatively low. Would you be open to showing your product marketing? I think there could be some relatively easy tweaks to increase that.
3% is low? Their (*edit: MARGINAL) CAC is 0. ZERO.
Even 1% would be pretty nice if it's COMPLETELY FREE!
@MarieMartens seeing your growth and the fact that you want to keep bootstrapping, I would keep working on your long term content strategy, improving the product and making sure you are ready to "digest" big spikes in users. Those spikes will come organically, but be sure you are ready to welcome them :)
Some things I would do if you want to increase speed:
Double down on content. Build assets, not just blog posts. Assets that are sooo good that people want to refer back. An awesome "asset" (even if takes muuuch longer) is better than 10 blog posts. The internet is plenty of blog post regurgitating the exact same things.
Defend your brand: If you keep growing, a copycat will emerge. They will start buying your brand on Google Ads. Defending that spot will cost you peanuts (when you buy your own kw, you pay waaaay less than what your competition would need to pay, so it's easy to "fix this leak").
Test retargeting. But please, just test it. PPC can be a bleeding if you don't know what you are doing. Test the impact of targeting 7-day visitors and increase the window if it performs (be aware with "attribution": you don't want the ppc platform to take credit for something that you already had 😊)
Obviously you could radically increase speed with prospecting ppc, but...honestly that would put some preasure that just does not make sense right now and you would lose profitability.
Other ideas that come to mind:
A. Have you tried the "typeform alternative" approach? Build a page comparing your main competitor features and yours. Buy their kw on Google Ads and see how it performs. I know it goes against what I just said, buuut it's super focused and if you find the right angle it would be a nice and cheap first step into ppc (that you could later scale).
B. have you tried a free trial of the paid version? I guess the paid version features are just "nice to have" (as opposing to "must have") for non high users, but some times "nice to have"s are worth paying for (and the user don't know until she/he tries!).
C. Have you tried an affiliate program? Not offering "money" in exchange of registrations, but maybe credit on the tool, like "refer to 5 users and the Tally Pro Free for x months". That way: 1) you help the product spread, 2) you see if the "free users" would be willing to make an effort to get the pro features and 3) you probably get some backlinks (not bad for SEO!).
Just my 2 cents!
Btw, huge congrats, you are an inspiration! I have loved reading your story.
I just got to Bali, and I am a marketer and owner of hanek.com, but currently thinking about saas indiehacking from Bali! (I don't have a tech co founder yet buuuut...I will find him/her eventually! 😊) and guys your story with Tally is inspiring. Thank you for sharing 🙏🏻
If you need help with marketing or just "company for brainstorm", count me in! Would be a pleasure to "personally" (or "zoomly") meet you!
Cheers!
I agree with everything you said except for one tiny thing... their CAC is very far from being zero. Just because they don't put money from their pockets doesn't mean it's zero.
Hi Fabri, that's definitely true. For the global picture, our costs of hosting Tally and living expenses for 2 would need to be included.
You are completely right, let's talk about "non organic marginal CAC" then 😊!
Your CAC has nothing to do with your ability to convert customers into a paying product? There are plenty of product marketing features available to try and move the 3% to 5%.
I totally agree that their CAC is very impressive and obviously getting virality isn't a small task. Huge accomplishment.
"Your CAC has nothing to do with your ability to convert customers into a paying product?"
Let's agree on disagree 😊.
Given that you implement things properly, the more you qualify your lead (through, among other things, actions that increase CAC), the higher the CR.
So I would say they are quite related.
I am not saying "that 3% cannot be improved". I am just saying that - bearing in mind the acquisition channel and always IMO - 3% doesn't seem "relatively low" to me!
But I may be wrong! :)
I think the combination of 3% and her saying that they aren't doing a lot tells me it could be a lot higher with some product marketing features. This is definitely what B2B companies are fairly poor at compared to B2C.
And congrats on Hanek! Just realize that I own a leather hanek bag 😄
This just made my day! 😍
Hi Ikigai,
Thanks a lot sharing, this is extremely valuable to us! I'll definitely come back to you if I have any more questions or want to discuss something more in depth.
Totally agree on the content strategy and doubling down on SEO. We have a referral program and a 'Typeform alternative' page. Haven't tried Google Ads yet, but will definitely look into your suggestions.
Thanks again!!
Sure, anything in particular? We're not really pushing for conversion in the product, and more focussed on growing the audience at this stage, then optimizing conversion.
Tally's great. As far as freemium goes, I think you folks nailed it.
What's one feature you think is your competitive advantage?
Thanks a lot!
I think there's 3 tactics that help us grow:
This is inspiring!
At Blinkstore, we are also growing organically. And I recently came across this blog which sums up a lot of digital marketing strategies for startups in India: https://www.aayushirachana.com/post/digital-marketing-strategies-for-startups-in-india
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Haha, happy you found the answer! Let me know if you still have questions afterwards, happy to share more.
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It has been our main USP from the start, so it has definitely helped us in getting more people on board faster and to create positive word-of-mouth as there are not a lot of free alternatives (except for Google forms for example).
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