How Tally Bootstrapped to $2M ARR using PLG

In 2019 Marie and Filip embarked on a mission to help small businesses and entrepreneurs create simple yet effective forms that can be easily embedded into the website without any coding knowledge. As a result the form builder Tally was created.

This 5-year old bootstrapped startup with five full-time team members has achieved the feat of $2M ARR as of Feb, 2025. They have effectively used freemium and product led growth to grow their product since launch to millions of customers.

Meet the Founders

Marie grew up in Burges, Belgium where she studied Communication Sciences at University of Ghent, she was always interested in the creative side of advertising and marketing. Before building Tally, Marie had a decade long work experience in operations, marketing, and sales. While she was majorly involved in product marketing, she also learned how to ship products in a lean and agile start up environment. This learning curve motivated her enough to chase her dream of starting her own product company and build products that would help her become digital nomads and travel the world.

Filip, Marie’s partner, is a serial technopreneur who likes to build SaaS products. He is an arts graduate from the American University in Bulgaria with the specializations in Computer Science and Economics. In the past, Filip has built products like Delta, an investment tracker app for users who are into crypto, ETFs, Stocks etc. and Hotspot - an app that connects hotels with travel industry influencers. Currently, he is focused on building and scaling Tally, a form builder for users with zero coding knowledge.

Discovering Opportunity During the Pandemic

Marie and Filip didn’t plan for a form builder app initially. In fact, they were already on their way to become digital nomads. Back in the early 2020, they were working on Hotspot, an app that was meant to connect hotels with travel influencers. While they were trying to figure out how to connect hotels with healthcare workers, they realized that it was very difficult to find a form builder that was easy to use and yet affordable. As Covid-19 became a pandemic, Marie and Filip could see no point in continuing with Hotspot idea when the whole world was under travel restrictions. As a result they had to pivot and focus all their energies into building a simple and effective form builder. As Marie puts it, “we wanted to make a simple, yet powerful form builder that allows you to create any type of form without breaking the bank. We set off building Tally, a new type of form builder for makers and no-coders.”

Tally Product Explained

True the founder’s philosophy, Tally is indeed an easy-to-use form and survey builder that can be used for free without having any coding language. It has an intuitive interface which the user can use it like a text document. The user can create an easy to share form link and even embed them onto their website. Some of the key features of Tally are mentioned below.

• Create unlimited forms for free

• Create unlimited submissions for free

• Add free logic and calculations

• Free form customizations

From the beginning Tally always had a narrow focus and didn’t want to deliver something that’s not going to be used by everyone. To ensure the team is constantly making the right decisions when it comes to developing features into the product, Marie and Filip would often weigh in the amount of effort vs the outcome of the feature, a tactic that has worked well for them so far.

Over the years Tally has evolved (Tally 2.0 was launched in 2023) into a more nuanced product. Today the engineering team has grown to a three person team and is shipping out newer features at a faster rate than before. They have also improved their customer support efficiency by ensuring first response time under 4 hours. As result of their efforts, today Tally is able to expand their customer base from start-ups and individual users to enterprise level clients.

Pricing

The main driving factor behind Tally’s success adoption was to create an affordable yet effective form builder for small teams and startups. This was the primary reason why almost 99% of the product features are free and there is no cap on number of forms and responses that you can collect. This strategy has helped them stand out and differentiate themselves from others in a crowded market. And as the demand for their product grew, they introduced their first paid plan ($29/Month) for Tally Pro and as of today they additionally offer an enterprise level price tier, Tally Business ($89/Month) for larger organizations.

Much Awaited MVP Launch

By September 2020, Marie and Filip were ready with their MVP and shared them with their close friends and family. It was a very simple form builder that could only take questions at the time of launch, without the publishing functionality. They relied on their small yet closely knit network of people to become the early adopters.

Within a month after launching their MVP, Marie started asking for feedback from their early users who were makers, indie hackers, start-ups via X (formerly Twitter) and Slack communities. The initial feedback from the users was very positive and encouraging. The users liked the fact that Tally acts like a document where you can simply type and insert building blocks. Soon the number of users started growing while Marie and Filip kept in touch with the current and potential users for their input. They made sure every useful feedback was incorporated into their product and shipped as new feature every week.

On personal front, Marie and Filip became proud parents of Lucy in December 2020 and went a little slow on Tally development. But this didn’t stop them from acquiring a small but very engaged community of 1500 users. By next year in March 2021, they felt ready to launch Tally on Product Hunt platform which offered exposure to a bigger audience. They remained the #1 product of day for close to 24 hours, which saw more than 1K upvotes, hundreds of positive reviews, dozens of investor calls and more than 600 newly acquired users.

The Slow and Steady March Towards 1K MRR

Once Marie and Filip started receiving the feedback from Tally users, they started to reach out to creators, indie hackers, startup founders who would find their product really useful. They first made a list of potential users by scanning through Product Hunt and X. Then they cold approached them, asking for their feedback. Though they didn’t receive any success initially, but some of the prospects took their time to respond and became early user and product ambassadors.

Right from building Tally in 2020 summer to launching the MVP version in September, 2020 to officially launching it on Product Hunt platform in March, 2021, Tally has come a long way (as of Feb 2025 the product has crossed $2M MRR). All of this was possible by a small team of two bootstrapped entrepreneurs based out of Belgium, Europe.

Powerful Customer Support

To ensure that customers have a great product experience, Marie and Filip always gave priority to customer support. They spent 50% of their time talking to customers and answering their queries on Slack community channel, X or via email. They believe in the philosophy that real time customer support and personalized offerings will help them differentiate from their competitors and turn loyal customers into ambassadors.

Their choice of communication channels looked like the following. Filip would focus on handling technical queries while Marie is more about handling the first line of queries and assigning them to Filip if they are technical in nature:

Slack: Filip takes call the technical questions over Slack and tries to respond within an hour.

Email: They used Missive, a collaborative inbox tool that allows Marie to handle all types of primary support queries and assign the technical queries or bug reports to Filip. It also allows them to handle any messages coming via Facebook.

X: Marie also manages the official twitter account and replies to any DMs within an hour. They have also allowed users to submit feature requests via Tally forms that are embedded in the roadmap and Help Center sections of the website. They also made sure to keep a track of all requests in Notion and update all the upvotes manually. They are planning to make this more transparent and automate the entire upvoting process.

Growth Strategies

Product Led Growth

Viral Growth Loop: Marie and Filip strongly believe that a good product can market itself efficiently. To ensure that people are becoming aware of their product through their free users, they added a Made with Tally badge in their product.

This strategy is similar to Flodesk’s strategy which helped create awareness and product visibility. The more the people came to know about the product, the more free user signed up for the product. This flywheel would convert a 3% of free users into Tally Pro users on a monthly basis.

Thanks to this strategy Tally was able to position itself differently in a crowded market that was dominated by the likes of Google and Typeform. Tally could easily do this by converting their free users into word of mouth promoters and potential leads source.

User Generated Content

From the beginning Tally has relied on its user community for product related content generation. This strategy not only helped the founders to build an active and engaged user community but also helped Tally put out a lot of documentation and tutorials online despite their small team size. They created a template gallery where the users can submit their own templates for other users to use in their forms. They also have a blog where they have uploaded all the product related documents and YouTube tutorials made by their users.

Build in Public

The entire growth journey of Tally is quite easy to track as the founders have chosen to share their ups and downs with their user community on their blog page, X (13K followers), Indie Hacker, Reddit (464 members), and LinkedIn (9K followers). They personally take efforts to answer customer queries and have built a strong feedback mechanism that helped them gain trust and build a strong connect with their customers. In their quest to give the best customer support they have rebuilt their help center page with Notion as their base CMS upon which they have added their own layer. The next thing on their checklist is to add more contextual tool tips for their products, a public upvoting feature and new feature request option.

SEO Growth

As Tally became more popular, more users started searching for the product on Google Search from 2022. They currently have monthly traffic of 74k users and has domain authority of 46 on Semrush. They have also explored paid growth around Jan 2024, however discontinued their paid marketing efforts since then.

Key Takeaways from Tally’s Journey

Tally has come a long since their first beta launch in September 2020. They have grown from a 2 member bootstrapped start-up to a 162 people strong organization with $2M ARR. Some of their key strategic moves that we can highlight here that made them a successful company are:

Understanding the product-market fit: They knew where their competitors were lacking and how they could use this information to build a product that can fill the market gap.

Customer focused: Right from the beginning they were always in touch with their customers which helped them improve and iterate their future product features and launch better versions successfully. This approach also helped them address any user related queries or bugs efficiently.

Converting users into brand ambassadors: They leveraged their free user base for advertising their brand and spreading the word by tagging them with “Made in Tally” badge.

Being transparent: The founder didn’t shy away from sharing their failures, struggles, and learnings with the community which won them the much needed trust and confidence of the users who would spread the word further.