Summary
Company: Tally
Product: Online-form builder
Revenue: $100.000/MRR
Funding: Bootstrapped
Intro
Have you ever had an idea, shared it with someone else, and then just decided it was a stupid idea just because the only feedback you got was “But there’s already something similar?” or “Uh, so you want to do a copycat”?
I am sure it happened to you and to thousands of other people. Think about how many companies never saw the light of the day because “there are a lot of competitors in the market”.
Well, luckily, some people persist and are not scared of entering a saturated market; sure, it’s hard, but you can do it with the right strategies. And that’s exactly what Tally did.
I’ve interviewed Tally’s co-founder Filip Minev and asked him about his background and how they grew the company to over $100,000 in MRR.
Before Tally
Filip started Tally together with his wife Marie. Before founding Tally, Filip already exited another startup he co-founded. The previous company was called Delta and it was basically an app to track your crypto. Getting the timing right, Filip launched the company and in a very short time, he and his co-founders sold it to eToro.
I asked him what did he do after the exit. “I immediately started working on another idea”.
Indeed, after the exit, Filip and Marie were on a holiday in Mexico when, during a brunch, they saw an influencer taking selfies in a café.
So the couple started to wonder, “How do influencers make deals with cafes or hotels?” which immediately sparked the next question, “It’s very likely that hotels are spammed with influencers’ requests. How do hotels select the right influencers?”. And that’s when HotSpot was started. The idea was to create a platform to connect hotels and influencers in a fast and easy way and make the process smoother for both.
However, they wanted to validate the idea first, before beginning to build the real platform. Filip decided he wanted to collect 100 emails from influencers and 100 emails from hotels to be sure there was a market.
“I can’t do this now, but back then I created an Instagram and started to reach out to influencers and hotels. Quite soon we were able to reach our target goal of 200 emails”.
Marie and Filip started inviting the first few people, charging hotels $29/month to be on the platform. After a few weeks, they reached $1k in MRR.
The only problem? It was the beginning of 2020.
Now, you can start to work on your next idea right after your first exit; you can decide to build a marketplace, which is something quite hard to build; you can build a bot to reach thousands of people, but there’s little you can do when the biggest health crisis in years freezes the entire world, impacting directly on both sides of your marketplace.
The idea for Tally
Filip and Marie decided to stick with the idea for a while. “We gave ourselves till the end of the year to get to $8k/month”. However, by the end of May, they realized COVID wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. So they stopped the company and decided to do something else.
This is when Filip started thinking back to when he created the form to collect emails. “I saw a space between a free but ugly option like Google Forms and a beautiful but expensive option like Typeform”. This is basically the idea behind Tally: an easy-to-use, with a minimalistic, Notion-like design, and to quote Filip “a very generous free plan”.
But now, they only had 6 months to build it and launch it. Luckily, Filip had already built something similar for a previous project and, after a bit, by the end of August, they had something to show to people. So the first version of the product is built; how do you get in front of people? Filip and Marie wanted to show it to the right people, people that could give them informed feedback about Tally. And what do you do if you are a bootstrapped startup with a desperate need for visibility? ProductHunt…but not the way you are thinking.
ProductHunt was not a good alternative to launch the product because it was still too simple. However, since other online form companies launched on PH, and since you can see who upvoted those products, Filip and Marie reached out directly to those people.
Launching on Product Hunt
I asked Filip what they asked. This was, after all, a cold outreach campaign and it’s not easy to get it right.
“We were not trying to sell it; we reached out looking for feedback. And this is also the way we got introduced to the no-code community.” At this point, it’s September 2020, Tally had its first few customers and was still free. At the end of November, they launched the first
Pro Plan at $9/month. Then in March 2021, they did their first proper launch on PH.
Filip highlights the importance of having an existing audience before launching on Product Hunt.
“When we launched on Product Hunt, we had about 1000 registered users to our product and a Slack dedicated to Tally where about 200 or 300 of those registered users were talking with us and giving us feedback. So before our launch, we emailed all our registered users and posted in our Slack channel.”
The Business Model
Another part of the success of Tally is their commitment to building in public. Basically, since the very beginning, they shared all their journey on their blog and on their Twitter profiles.
What’s interesting about Tally is that, despite being bootstrapped, they have a freemium model and the free plan is full of features.
“I didn’t want Tally to be one of those companies that keep pushing you to upgrade; I love companies like Notion or Raycast with a very generous free plan so that when users do want to upgrade, they are actually willing to do so and it’s not a problem”.
The freemium model works especially well for a company like Tally: every time someone embeds a form on a website, other users will see the Tally badge and may decide to try it out.
“It’s a positive flywheel effect that can help you grow quite fast; of all the users that try our product, about 3% upgrade”.
Current Revenue
Right now, Tally has over 100,000 registered users. Here’s the evolution of their revenue:
– March 2021: $1K MRR
– March 2022: $15K MRR
– March 2023: $50K MRR
– March 2024: $100K MRR
Personally, I love to see companies bootstrap and reach this kind of revenue with such a small team.
