# How We Built a $1.5M ARR SaaS With 3 People and $0 in Ad Spend

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** MicroConf
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt6HAEuwEug
- **Дата:** 20.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 35:47
- **Просмотры:** 459
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50699

## Описание

Marie Martens, co-founder of Tally, shares how she and her partner Filip Minev bootstrapped a freemium form builder from zero to $1.5M ARR with a team of just three people and no paid advertising. 

In this MicroConf Europe 2024 talk, Marie walks through the full journey: from a failed travel tech startup and a pandemic pivot, to building a product-led growth engine powered by a generous free plan, community-driven word of mouth, and radically simple product design.

She covers how they found their first users through cold outreach on Product Hunt, launched successfully after six months of preparation, and grew through a flywheel where free forms with Tally branding drive organic discovery. 

Marie also shares the hard lessons — handling 400,000 users with no support team, learning to say no, navigating abuse and phishing on their platform, shifting from remote digital nomad life to a physical office, and evolving from indie hackers into company builders.

Key topics in this talk:
— Fr

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

Thanks loaded's an honor to be here. And to be able to share our story with you at today. My name is Marie and I'll share a bit more about how we're bootstrapping our form builder tool. Now before we get started who knows what tally is? Quite a few people good. Who is actually using it? A bit less. — Okay, work to do. — [snorts] — So for those who don't know what tally a quick introduction tally is a form building tool. It's a very simple way for you to create online forms and surveys for free. Tally is being used for tons of use cases. You can create lead generation forms, collect product feedback, even sell products or make quizzes and minutes. We're not here to do a self pitch. So no worries. This is me and sorry. my co-founder and partner life Philip. We're a team of three people working full-time on tally next week we will be four. — [snorts] — So it's a very small team and I had to add a picture of our family. So yeah, we obviously didn't meet Omar yet at the time because we wanted to have it all and at the same time. So we decided to make kids and launch business. I would advise against this. — Biggest learning of today. We're also building in public. So I'm also one of those founders sharing revenue graphs on Twitter. Sorry for that and we are closing in on 150k MRR. Thanks. — All right. So why tally? Why did we decide to build yet another form builder in the space? That's the question that people ask me usually. And to tell you that story we have to go back to this beach Mexico in 2018. We were traveling. We didn't have kids yet. Good times and we were at this beach. I love them but And we were dreaming as we do we're both dreamers and we actually wants to become digital nomads. You know, we wanted to code on the beach not have bosses travel the world work remotely. And [snorts] so we needed an idea, right? We needed a product that we were going to build that would allow us to make some money and to do that. And [snorts] we came up with this idea to build something completely different than tally actually a platform that connects travel influencers with small boutique hotels. We don't know anything about hotels. We also travel influencers. So no founder market fit at all. But you know, we thought it would be a good idea at the time travel influencers were really booming especially where we were in Mexico. There were tons of them. So we noticed that hotels were being like flooded with requests especially the popular hotels, right? To work with influencers. But then there were a lot of small ones that could actually use more visibility and we would help them as well to market their hotel. As it goes when you're on holiday, it was just an idea. We had to go back home back to reality. But we did like whip up a quick landing page. We gave it a name and a logo I think because that's the fun part of [snorts] of starting something new. It was called hotspot and we decided that we were going to build it when we could find 100 hotels that were actually interested. And because we were going to get a massive influx, right? We needed a form to actually capture the interest of all the hotels that would you know, hopefully want to use our product. And that's the first time we actually talked about forms. So we wanted to use typeform but it was pretty expensive. It looked good but we couldn't afford it at the time. And so we ended up using Google Forms and really didn't like how it looked like but you know, it did the job. Um I had a full-time job as a marketer at the time and Philip was running another startup called Delta. Previous startup. So we didn't really have the time to work on it a lot. We did find 100 hotels that were interested in the product but it kind of just stayed an idea until 2019. That's when Delta Philip's previous startup got sold. And so this was really a pivotal moment for us because we had a full stack engineer at home with time

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

and some money on the bank. So we thought this is the perfect moment to actually try and grow hotspot. So that's what we did. Now this was beginning 2020. Um A bit of a sad moment in our history. — [snorts] — So we were super excited. We're going to launch this you know, product and travel tech. I decided to quit my job. Everyone said I was crazy. I had a great job. Our friends were having kids buying houses. You know, we just turned 30 that kind of this phase of our lives. But we wanted to do something else. And Philip said actually what's the worst thing that can happen, right? If it doesn't work out you just find another job. We pretend that nothing happened. And so no one said pandemic. — So this is what happened. We rented out our apartment. I quit my job. We flew to Bali as you do as a digital nomad and we never got there. We had our first stop in Bangkok. We were there for a week. Covid hit. We had a few first customers lost them all obviously because no one could travel. And we had to fly back. Now flying back was also not that easy because you know, there were no flights borders were closing. Also I'm Belgian. Philip is Bulgarian. We have different visa rules. So we couldn't both stay in Asia for that long. So anyway, long story short had to fly back. Had to fly back through five countries or something and eventually got back to Belgium — [snorts] — after 1 week and went into lockdown. So that was our digital nomad story. — [snorts] — At the time we thought like how long can this take, right? Probably the virus will be gone by summer. We'll keep building. We're going to write some content. We're going to prepare some marketing campaigns. We'll be summer. Everything will be over and we will be ready you know, to launch again. That didn't happen. So by the time it was summer of 2020 we decided [snorts] that we had to do something else and basically we gave ourselves 1 year to try you know, the whole startup thing. And [snorts] we already used 6 months of that. So every Friday in lockdown we would go sit on our little Terrace and brainstorm about new ideas. We had the craziest ideas but one that kind of stuck was forms. And I have a background in marketing. So I have used all types of forms before. Philip as well in previous jobs and then we had used forms for hotspot as well and we never really found like a form builder that we loved to use. And obviously everyone needs forms, right? At one point but they're super boring. So it was not the most sexiest product to work on. But we thought like hey, you have Google Forms. It's actually extremely powerful and free but it just looks bad. All right. Then you have players like a typeform. They're really praised for their design but they're really expensive especially when you're a bootstrapper and you're just starting out because they have volume based pricing. You collect 10 submissions. You need to pay more. That's also an experience that we really just personally didn't like. At the same time we started using notion. It's a product that we love to use. We love how backed it is by the community but also how they kind of managed to make note taking fun again. So we thought what if we can do the same thing with forms? What if we can make forms fun? So that's what we tried to do and what we're still doing since 2020. And that's how tally was born. So as you can see it has really intuitive interface. It's not a drag and drop like most form builders out there. You can simply type and insert blocks as you go. The interface is not the only thing that makes us different. Of course we're bootstrapped just two people no marketing budgets. So we had to do something else different, right? And um You'll see that we're not great at following playbooks or follow whatever works for most SAS. We decided basically to give away everything for free. Why did we do this? Well because most form builders are pretty expensive and have that volume based pricing and we just didn't like that. Like we didn't want you to get more answers and then have to pay more. So we thought we'll just give you unlimited forms and unlimited submissions for free. That's how we started. We didn't even

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

have a paid plan in the first months. Afterwards, we introduced Tally Pro. So, that was until last week actually the only paid subscription that we had at 29 months and yeah, it unlocks extra functionality. So, how did we get started? And that's actually a question I got a lot the past few days. How did we find our first users? Especially when you know, you don't have any budget. And I think yesterday at dinner we talked about this quite a lot. But so, we started doing cold outreach. Now, what did this mean for Tally? We basically just went to Product Hunt. And we looked for people that upvoted similar products like ours. So, it could be form building tools, but it could be really anything in no-code or productivity space. I would make lists of hundreds, thousands of people. Find their contact details, did all of that manually. Doesn't scale obviously, but it did the job at the time. And I would send them this type of DM really short. Like, "Hey, we built this. If you would have 5 minutes, please give us some feedback. " We did this. Well, I did this over and over again while Philip was building the MVP. If someone would come in, we would invite them to our Slack channel. Philip could talk to them. Could learn and improve the product. We would join Slack groups. Anything from founder Slacks, no-code Slacks, productivity, you know, anything in the hacker space was also important for us in the beginning. We would join those and then we would do a lot of social monitoring. So, everywhere where I could find a conversation about forms, we would try to pitch in Tally. Um So, that's really how we got our first users. It's pretty simple. You know, I think it's something that everyone can do. It is not that fun to do. Um we also got a quite high reply rate. So, I think around 15 to 20% of people actually replied. Which is I believe pretty high for cold outreach. So, that was like a first sign of okay, we're actually doing something that might you know, might work. We also started building in public. So, for us, what does this mean? Um we're not tweeting all the time. We're not that good at it. But we basically once in a while when we hit a milestone, can be in hiring or revenue, we try to write up a longer blog post with all the learnings that we had in in those months or the or that year. Started sharing that. It kind of really helped us to grow like personal audience to get more users in. It's content that is relevant for other founders. Other founders might of course also be interested in using our product. So, we started doing that. You can find a lot on our blog. I forgot to include the URL, but it's blog. tally. so. We share basically everything. Our costs. This is a template of our revenue forecast. We have a PLL sheet. So, that's one thing we did right. Um change log or road map, but basically share everything in there. So, you can find that at blog. tally. so. We did all of that for around 6 months and then we decided to launch on Product Hunt. I know this is not a popular topic these days. It's not the best days for Product Hunt. But anyway, it was a great platform for us and actually still is. We got tons of users from it and we had a few really successful launches. So, you might wonder why we waited 6 months. So, yeah, our first daughter was born actually a week after we originally planned to launch on Product Hunt. So, that didn't work out. We had to postpone it a bit. A few months and we also wanted to have So, Tally was really basic at that time. It was not just an MVP, but we wanted to have the basic form features that other form builders have. So, the feedback would not be like, "Oh, it's great, but you cannot collect an email, you know, like I'm not going to use it. " So, we made sure we had like the basic set of features that we thought everyone would need to be able to use it. Um this was a really important day for us. We had around 1,500 users when we did that. Free users, a few customers. We doubled the user base in one day. Um and we got tons of feedback, tons of positive feedback as well. And that's kind of where uh Tally really started growing. So, I would highly recommend doing this if you're building a similar product. Um I made a checklist as well of everything we did and didn't do. You can also find

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

it on the blog. Now, how did we grow after that, right? Um and a while ago I discovered this Reddit thread that analyzes / roasts the success of Tally. And I think it was Andrew that says, "Your story is best told by your customers. " So, that's what we're going to do today. Um [snorts] I'm actually going to read this thread together with you and see how our users think that Tally is growing or what they think that works for us. So, it starts like this. 8 months ago, I don't get it. How does something like tally. so actually succeed, right? Um First and foremost, this is not intended to criticize them. I'm genuinely delighted by their success. However, it leaves me somewhat about how to identify successful product ID. They seem to be achieving 70k MRR. This was a bit longer than 8 months ago. Um how can a form builder thrive in such a competitive market, right? It's a really good question. There's tons of form builders out there. Like, why on earth would this one actually work? And so, the conversation starts and S Pop says, "First time visiting and it's immediately clear it's positioning. Their core user has a succulent on their desk. They like every teenager engineering post, but they don't make music themselves. Correct. Um and they prefer yerba mate over coffee. So, of course this is exaggerated, but it is true that positioning is important for us, right? We're small. We're trying to claim a very small percentage of a huge market. For us to be successful, we only need a small percentage, right? We're only a team of two or three people. And so, we need to position ourselves in a different way. So, we have a different story. pricing model. We have a different product design and we do try to repeat that in every possible way. So, it continues. There are people who will be repulsed by what their site does. Your average stuffy SME owner who wants Google Forms will have zero clue. And that's true. How on earth a notepad looking thing is a form builder, right? But they don't care. They won't win in a saturated market by trying to win every visitor. Instead, they want to make the few visitors they win really love it. They want to turn those people into ambassadors. Um and uh yeah, that last sentence is painful. — Um but anyway, you get the picture. So, I think this is an important part as well and I mentioned it before. We are trying to build a form builder that everyone loves to use. We're ambitious. By now, we do want to become a household name in forms. But when we launched, we also realized that it might not be for everyone, right? This editor might appeal to a certain product certain audience. It might be an audience that is a bit more in the product tech engineering sphere. That's something we learned later on. Um and so, for us it was really important that the people that do like the product really love it and that we can turn them into ambassadors. So, the market is important because it's a really big market. We don't need to educate the market, right? Everyone needs forms. Every team will need them at some point. We don't have the budgets to you know, tell people why they would need forms. Um so, we don't have to do that. We just need to claim a very small percentage of the market that likes what we're building. Then, and this is my favorite one. Honestly, it's a world world-class form building experience. Tally's editor is so easy to use. The end result looks good. Tons of flexible usage options for embedding and so on. Name one better. I'll wait. Um there's Typeform, but its editor is a bit of an overkill and not as easy as Tally. And so, the important part here is the UX. So, a lot of users choose us because of the interface. It is simple. It is really easy to use. And even though that sounds like that it you know, it should be easy to use anyway, it's not always the case, right? A lot of form builders are bloated with features and we try to be as powerful as them, but still design it in a very simple and easy to use way. So, UX really important for us. So, do you think they had to burn up a lot of front capital on ad spend to be able to compete against that market? Well, no. You know

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

we're bootstrapped. That's why we are here and we haven't spent on ads. Actually, we just started last month um experimenting with influencer marketing. But so, we haven't done any paid until now. And then, and this one is interesting as well. Um I can't tell you if it was a lot of money, but I can tell you that it was infinitely less capital than if they didn't have that kind of positioning. Um the creators probably personally come from the segment they targeted. We do have succulents on our desks, so that's true. Um and they could use their existing followers and networks. That's not true. We didn't have any of that. Um And then he says, "And this is also important just to confirm my theory. They don't even show up when I search for a form builder. " Ouch. But they're the third result when you search for a form builder or forms for Notion form builder. Notion obviously has been important for us, especially because our interface is inspired by Notion and a lot of the Notion users started using Tally. Why is this important? Because a lot of the Notion creators and ambassadors are very vocal. Very vocal on social media, share the tools they use, and we were able to tap in to that. Of course, by now you have a lot of form builders that are doing the same. Notion is also launching their own forms, so we'll see how that goes. But there have been we have been able to define a couple of niches and create some landing pages that work for us. So, SEO is a part of the strategy, but it's definitely not our main focus. Um important to mention is that kind of build our own link building machine because every form is a tally. so link is being shared and is being embedded on millions of websites. So, we do have a domain authority of 88, which really helps us there. So, the conversation continues. Acceptable Pickle says, "Okay, chill. It's just Notion and Twitter. Don't make marketing sound like rocket science. " And he's right, right? It's not rocket science. And then someone else said, "It's just the marketing and the product. I haven't been oversold to and that's a big part of what what makes this feel different, right? It's not the typical tech bro overpromise, glitchy, icky, flash-in-the-pan crap. " Um the husband and wife do play delight SEO and marketing simple breezy, making it seem like a walk in the digital park. They're the cool cats of the tech world, making the complex game look like child's play. Okay. — [snorts] — Um thanks. That's a big compliment, I guess. Um so I think the important part here is they mentioned the simplicity. And so again, sounds easy, but simplicity is super important for us. So, the product is simple, our marketing messaging design is pretty simple, the product design is simple, our pricing is simple. So, we kind of try to pull that through in every aspect of what we do. And we do notice that is also a reason why people choose for Tally. So, [snorts] you might wonder, are the other form builders that hard to use? And that is actually when Shrimp Tikka Masala hits the nail on the head. Um [snorts] because he says, "Okay, a lot of form building tools have a lot of limitations for a free user, but Tally basically gives everything away for free. " And that is actually why we are here today with you, being able to share this story because that's the big part of our success, right? — [snorts] — Free forms have made with Tally branding. If you share a form, obviously we have the viral component baked in. Forms are created to share with other people. So, today if you discover Tally, it is most likely because you have submitted a Tally form and that's how you found our brand. And so, that's how we grow. It's product-led growth. Here's how the flywheel works, right? Tally is free, which makes us be able to give a very quick time to value. Users can come in. They don't need to create an account. pay. They can just go from the landing page straight into the form editor. We actually didn't even have a landing page. It was just the form editor at the beginning. So, you go to tally. so and you were just in the editor. Figured out that we might need a landing page at one point. So, we changed that.

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

And so, that turns that makes sure that people, you know, use it and if they like it, they also share it, right? So, it creates positive word of mouth. This turns into more free users. More free users means more forms with our branding. More people discover Tally. Of those free users, around 3% converts to Tally Pro. That's how we make money. Something dropped there, — but you get the picture. This is really These are the three core principles. This is what helps us when we need to make decisions as kind of our framework as you like. Tally is free. Tally is simple. And we always put our users first. So, customer support has been hugely important in our journey. Um I'll talk a bit about that later on. But those three things are what I believe got us until here. Now, to end, I have six more minutes. Perfect. Um I'll just share a couple of shifts that we made professionally and also personally throughout these four years. And the first one is, and also seems obvious, but wasn't really that obvious to me. We really shifted from saying yes to everything to saying no to almost everything as well. What does that mean? So, I mentioned support before. We did customer support for ourselves for 2 and 1/2 years. We didn't want to outsource it, but obviously we have 400,000 users worldwide. We give away a lot of things for free. The downside is that you also need to support those people, right? We [snorts] did that ourselves. Why? Well, we wanted to learn, right? We wanted to talk to the customers, learn, and see what we had to improve. We don't regret doing that. I think it taught us a lot, but of course at one point we were just doing support. We couldn't grow or build the product anymore. So, we had to start setting some boundaries, if you will. And so, we had to limit the support scope. People could just email media@tally. so and you would get a reply within the minute. We cannot do that anymore. So, we had to hire someone. That was the first step. Um [snorts] We hired someone remotely. I'll talk a bit more about that later on, but that was also a bit of a mistake for us because we started losing context. We didn't really manage to implement a process that kept us in the loop from all the feedback and helped us to implement the feedback back into the product. That was one thing. We had a Slack channel. Everyone who joined Tally could join the Slack. We had to stop it because in my dreams it was a going to be a, you know, a tight-knit community. In reality, it was just a 24/7 chat support, basically. Um we had to close access. We still have it. So, it's a Slack group with 3,000 people in it, 3,000 early users. So, it's really valuable for us. Um but we had to close access. We had to stop shipping features on demand, right? So, back in the day we would get a request, okay, one day later feature would be live. Philip would just, I don't know, just doing his thing and then it went live the next day. Cannot do that anymore, obviously. So, we had to slow down and that kind of hurt. It also hurt our business. Well, it didn't really, but we thought it would. We actually noticed that when our son was born we were working with a few freelance developers. And that was also a lesson from Omar that we only learned late. We hired very slowly, but we also fired very slowly. And we realized we were in the hospital. We came back, you know, with a new baby after 3 days and the whole thing exploded. And so, it kind of learned us that they, you know, the people we were working with weren't really helping us. We're actually giving Philip more work than than help. So, we fired them at that point and decided to take it easy in the middle of those four years for 3 months. And we had the best months revenue-wise. So, we also realized like, "Hey, maybe the speed is not that important. " Or at least we've built something that grows by itself, right? The product is selling itself. So, that was a big learning for us. — [snorts] — I used to say yes to every partnership, right? Every interview, every podcast, everything until I also realized that that's not the best time management. It did help us, you know, be able to spread the word. Another thing, we don't do calls or

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

almost never. We don't have meetings and we almost never go to conferences besides MicroConf. Yeah. Another shift from free to fair use. So, I've mentioned a lot that we have a very generous free plan and of course that also attracted abusers, right? We've had a ton of abuse of our product. People using it to create fishing forums, sending mass emails and so on. A few months ago we were blocked worldwide for days. We actually didn't know how to get unblocked. So, that was a fun week. So, Philip had to implement a lot of things. He can share more about the technical details. I have no clue how he did it, but we have abuse reports. We use AI to detect yeah, malicious forms and to be able to block them before they actually do any damage. We get a lot of those. How many per day? I don't know. Hundreds. Well, too much. Another thing we implemented is our fair use policy. So, after a few years we noticed that the usage of most of our users was within one segment. You know, people create a form. You maybe have a contact form on your website. For startups you don't have thousands of submissions per month, you right? It's usually a bit less than that. So, we could detect some outliers. People that for example collect more than 50,000 submissions every month. And that's what we started calling excessive usage because actually the price of Tally Pro didn't cover you know, the cost. The cost for us as a company. So, it wasn't really economically viable. We introduced this. It basically means that if you collect crazy amount of submissions for a few months in a row that we will contact you and that you will pay extra. It's not a enterprise plan that is on our website or anything like that. We only have I think 10 people on it right now. We run it manually. We're not trying to optimize it, but it is something we had to do. And we'll see how this evolves in the future. To give you an idea, people usually pay 29 a month. These 10 customers pay from 400 to 1,000 dollar a month. We made a shift from becoming digital nomads to going to the office every day and that was also an interesting one. Well, we are you know, co-founders, but also partners in life. We also decided to have two kids. And so we worked from home for four years. What did this mean? Yeah, work-life balance didn't exist. Lines between personal and professional lives completely you know, blurred. — [snorts] — We started struggling with remaining productive, disconnecting with work, feeling burned out. So, we decided that we had to move to an office. We did that since last month. We also started hiring some freelancers remotely. We had difficulty with communication. We had some bad hires. We couldn't monitor their performance. I think they were actually surfing instead of coding. And we also found it difficult to build a team culture, you know, with people that we had never met. And that were working remotely for Tally. So, we decided to move into an office. It's not just an office. It's a office we're really proud of. This is not our our own building. It's basically a startup campus that is located in this It's an old circus that has been renovated in Ghent, Belgium. You're always welcome to visit. We decided for this location just because we are surrounded by lots of other startups and as a small team it's really important, right? We want to see other people. We want to learn from other people. We don't have investors. There we have access to a pool actually of really experienced entrepreneurs that can give us advice. There's a big community. So, this has really been like a new start for us. So, we really went from wanting to be digital nomads to going into the office every day and it's not for everyone, but this is what works for us now. And then to end because I'm going over time. You know, we really started as Indie Hackers. Just wanted to build a product, wanted to create a sustainable income for our family. And we shifted into you know, we're building a company now. So, the product kind of outgrew us as founders and we really had this shift in vision. We became more ambitious even, I think. And we want to become a household name

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 35:00) [35:00]

in form builders and we want to do it in the bootstrapped way. So, we grow slower than [snorts] our competitors, but we run a profitable business and we're very proud of that. We also realized that we had to hire a senior team and so to do that when you're bootstrapped you need a bit more time because you need more money, right? So, we're also working on that right now. We have to scale processes, infrastructure, all the boring stuff, but this is what's keeping us busy now. The talk from Paddy was very useful for that. So, thank you. So, these are the four shifts that we made throughout the four years. These are the three principles that keep us going and keep us growing. Thank you so much for your time. —