Another victory of bootstrap, the story of tally.so

As of early 2025, Tally has surpassed $2 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) with a lean team of five, all while remaining self-funded and independent. And the story of tally is also a build in public story.

What is tally?

Tally is a notion-liked no code form builder. You can create forms just like writing a doc in Tally. Behind tally.so is a bootstrapped project with two founders, which grows to over $2M ARR today.

How did they get this idea?

Tally.so was founded by Marie Martens and Filip Minev in 2020, Tally is a no-code form builder. It is designed well, notion-styled, and very popular.

Well, the story didn’t come from the form builder at first. Marie and Filip tried to build a platform to connect Hotels and Traveling Influencers. Well, they did it at the wrong time. COVID-19 killed their product ruthlessly.

A pivotal turning point.

Something came from their experience, not what they imagined.

The COVID-19 killed their first startup, yet also revealed something to them. The forms that aren’t that expensive for indie makers and early stage startups and look great. It’s calling for them.

Although Typeform and Google Forms already existed in the market, they often neglected the needs of indie makers, early stage startups and small businesses. They tried Typeform, Google Forms, and they found something painful which is form builders are either too expensive or too restrictive in free tiers, and most of them are not well designed. These users struggled to find tools that could effectively meet their requirements.

They decided to build a simple and powerful form builder, which turned out to be tally. It was a very simple idea, Marie and Philip were fans of Notion. They make the product simple and beautiful. They are connecting the dots.

The background stories of founders

Their complementary backgrounds—Marie in marketing and Filip in software development—have been pivotal to Tally’s success.

Marie Martens: From Marketing to SaaS Entrepreneurship

Born and raised in Bruges, Belgium, Marie pursued a Master’s degree in Communication Sciences at Ghent University. She began her career at a major Belgian publishing house, advancing from a research executive to a marketing manager. Later, she joined the digital product studio In The Pocket, where she gained experience in agile product development and B2B marketing. In early 2020, Marie and Filip co-founded Hotspot, a marketplace connecting hotels with travel influencers. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the travel industry, prompting them to pivot. Drawing from their frustrations with existing form-building tools, they launched Tally in the summer of 2020.

Filip Minev: Technical Expertise and Entrepreneurial Experience

Filip Minev is a seasoned software engineer and entrepreneur. He previously founded Delta, a cryptocurrency portfolio tracking app acquired by eToro. Filip’s technical acumen and startup experience have been instrumental in developing Tally’s intuitive and powerful form-building platform.

How did they grow at first for validation

They started with the closet and manual cold outreach

They launched their MVP in August 2020, shared it with their families and friends for an early test and refined the product based on their feedback. Tally was a very simple product, You can create unlimited numbers for forms and submissions even with a free version. it was very generous which brings words spreading.

Then they made a move to scan product hunt and twitter for creators, indie hackers and startup founders to find hundreds of potential customers, they reach out to them for a trial and feedback. They also built a slack channel to keep in touch with their users and listen to their voices.

TIP

• Look for similar products on Product Hunt and reach out to the people who upvoted or commented

• Share your MVP or product with established makers

• Join relevant slack groups or communities and contribute

• Use Tweetdeck to scan conversations on Twitter about similar products

• Reply to relevant questions on forums (Reddit, Quora, Indie Hackers...)

The early growth of Tally

Wait, But People are actually paying for a free product

—— October ‘20 $64 MRR, 184 users

—— November '20, $119 MRR, 344 users(not having to sign up to try out the product.)

—— December '20, $138 MRR, 750 users(free templates like feedback template)

—— March '21, $380 MRR, 1.500 users(Launch on PH)

By far, nothing fancy, the numbers are growing, not fast. But the paying users are growing. It has been almost half a year, but they insisted. Some of us today might have dropped the product and the idea too easily.

—— April'21, $1156 MRR, 4000 users(more integrations, Notion & Airtable and more features)

After the lauch on PH, they started growing, things have changed. They finally reached a mile stone of €1K MRR and 4000 users.

Their Top 5 channels:

1. Product Hunt

2. Twitter

3. 'Powered by Tally' badge on free forms

4. No-code communities

5. Indie Hackers

Whenever they see someone asking a question about an online form builder (on social media or forums) they try to mention Tally.

— June'21, €2.080 MRR, 5.800 users(startup program and affiliate program)

— August '21, $2.774 MRR, 7.500 users

— October '21, $5.000 MRR, 11.000 users

Simplicity and Free usage is their weapon

They make the simplest way to create forms as their mission from the day 1.

99% of all features are free, They launched Tally Pro early. But they can still make money with 99% features free. And they made free & unlimited forms their advantage!

The First Launch on Product Hunt

They created their product hunt launch checklist using notion, and they shared it through notion site, you can get the full checklist it here.

They got a really great outcome from Product Hunt Launch, more than 1000 upvotes, hundreds of positive reviews, dozens of investor calls, and +600 new users. And that’s when they got their $1K MRR!

How did they do in the first year?

By combining relentless one-to-one outreach, a highly-generous free plan, community-driven iteration in an open Slack, and high-visibility Product Hunt launches, they bootstrapped Tally from zero to 16k users and $8,5k MRR in a year!

They got to $30k MRR with only a two-person team.

New main acquisition channels:

1. Search

2. "Made with Tally" marketing

3. Twitter

The second year they focused on Product Led Growth and Customer Support. With a two-person team, they spent 50% of their time talking to users and answering questions on Slack, Twitter or email.

2023: Year-over-year MRR growth exceeds 250%!

They went on tour to NYC and Barcelona, shared the story of tally, it turns out to get them more tally users. Reached 100,000 users and doubled revenue.

They also launched 2.0 in PH and got 15k new users in 30 days.

By the time they reached $60K MRR, they still have a team with only 4 members. It was two years since they launched MVP when they hired their first employee. Which is a pretty small team. I’ve seen a lot of founders are so hurry to hire dozens of employees even without a Product that have real paying users. Not to mention a product generating nearly $1M ARR. They get to $75K MRR in 2023.

The growth trajectory

September 2020: Released MVP with basic form features and started collecting user feedback.

March 2021: Launched publicly on Product Hunt, gaining strong traction among indie makers.

October 2021: Reached 11,000 users and $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

February 2022: User count grew to 20,000 and MRR hit $10,000.

September 2022: Launched Tally Pro and added native integrations with Airtable, Notion, and Stripe.

March 2023: Released public API and added multi-language support.

September 2023: Released Tally 2.0 with a full UI redesign and performance improvements.

February 2024: MRR surpassed $100,000 and the team expanded to 3 full-time members.

June 2024: Introduced AI-assisted form creation and native automation features.

January 2025: Launched plugin marketplace and visual workflow builder.

May 2025: Tally remained fully bootstrapped, serving millions of submissions monthly with a lean team.

You know the rest story of tally.

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