SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How We Bootstrapped to $50k MRR with Team of 2
24 May 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Good morning, everyone.
I'm really excited to be here with you today. Thank you so much for the kind introduction, Nathan, and for inviting us. Looking at the intro video, I think we're one of the smaller fish here today. We have a bit of a different story because we're bootstrapped. And so I'm going to share a bit more about how we bootstrapped our form builder tool, Tally, to 50K MRR with a small team of four.
So I'm Marie, I'm the co-founder of Tally and I'm going in the next 20 minutes to show you a little bit more about how we came up with the idea, how do we grow Tally and how do we now try to scale it with a small team. And to start at the beginning, where did it all start, right? So if I say we, maybe important, I mean myself and my co-founder, Philip. He's sitting over there.
Maybe you can wave. Philip is a technical brain behind Tally. He's also my partner in life. He's born in Bulgaria. I was born and raised in Belgium. I have mainly a background in B2B marketing. And Philip is a full stack engineer. He has joined and also founded other startups before.
And to really start at the beginning, we need to go back to 2018, to this beach in Mexico, because Tally was actually not our first startup idea. We had a completely different idea when we started. We actually wanted to build a marketplace for hotels and travel influencers. So nothing to do with forms or with no code.
It kind of stayed with an idea because we were both working full time somewhere else. Now in 2019, Delta, which was the last startup that Philip has founded, was actually acquired by eToro. So that means we had a bit of runway and also a bit of time. And he decided to start working on Hotspot. That was our idea to launch something in travel tech. Now, we got our first customers.
We also had a couple of thousands of influencers on the platform. So I also decided to quit my job and to go full-time on this project. We also always had the dream to actually live like the digital nomad lifestyle, work remotely and build a business while we were doing that. Little did we know that 2020 would be the worst time ever to launch a startup in travel.
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Chapter 2: What is the story behind bootstrapping Tally to $50k MRR?
And so that's actually where our story begins and where the first section of this presentation begins. So we're situated here in the first couple of months, basically, where we started building our MVP until we got our first users. So the main question here was, we didn't really have an audience. How can we find people that want to use our form builder in an already very competitive market?
We're bootstrapped. We didn't have any budget. So we kind of thought, where can we find those creator startups that we were targeting? So we decided to go to Product Hunt. and basically find people that had uploaded similar products. So we would go check, find other founders that had uploaded form building tools.
We would reach out to them and do this over and over and over again for about half a year, actually. So we had contacted thousands of people by cold outreach. And that is how we found our first users, in a very non-scalable way. And this actually introduced us in new communities, founders, Slack groups, also no-code communities. And that's how we found our first users.
We were also scanning conversations online, mainly on Twitter, but also indie hackers, Reddit. And whenever it was relevant, we would start and pitch Tally. At the same time, we're also building in public, which means we basically share everything. We're an open startup, so we share our revenue, we share our processes.
So we do this to build an audience, but also to get feedback from those first users. This also shows that we're in it for the long run and that we're shipping fast. It also builds trust with our audience. These are just some of the examples of things that we've shared. We have a public roadmap. We are very transparent about what we're building next. We've also shared what it costs to run Tally.
How does our forecast revenue template look like? We've measured our product market fit, shared those results. So all of that you can actually find on our blog. So after a couple of months, actually more than six months, we felt ready to launch our own product on ProductHand. Now, you might wonder, why did we wait so long?
Because it's such a competitive space, we really wanted to make sure that we had all the crucial features that our competitors also had. So basically, we kept on building the product. And while gathering feedback, we also found our first around 1,000 users. And so in March 21, we kind of felt ready to launch Tally on Product Hunt. We made sure that we were prepared.
So we actually have this checklist that we also published. You can also find it on our website if anyone would be planning a product launch, probably not in this room, but you never know. So what did we do? We made sure that we had the newsletter, we had social media updates, we had everything prepared to make sure that the launch went well. It was kind of a roller coaster.
We were like product number one for 23 hours of the day and then we kind of lost the spot in the last hour. We ended up product number four. But that was not really important. I think the important thing was that we got tons of positive feedback that day. So we could really validate our product and we knew we're building something that people actually want to use.
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Chapter 3: How did the founders pivot from their original startup idea?
Every company needs a form, right? some part in their journey. So we're active in a growing SME market, especially after COVID, with a growing focus on digitalization. And we're also riding a no-code hype or wave with more and more people adopting no-code technologies, especially to save time and costs. So all of that makes this an interesting market for us to be active in.
All right, so we also, of course, needed a business model that fits this product-led growth. And because we're a bootstrap team, it was really important that the product is self-service, right? So that the barriers are low enough. There's no sign-up. You can just go to tally.so, try it out, create a form without actually having to create an account.
Now, preferably we would also have a very transparent and low pricing. And because of the low pricing and low budgets that we have, because we're bootstrapped, we also needed low cost acquisition channels. So how does this theory actually translate into practice for Tally? So Tally is largely free, right? So this is kind of how our pricing page looks like.
You can get everything that you need to create beautiful forms, to share them, to embed them, to integrate them with your other favorite tools for free. We also don't have a volume-based pricing, so you can create unlimited forms and submissions for free as well. So you might wonder, how do we make money? Besides our free tier, we also have Tally Pro. It's just very simple.
Again, the simplicity comes back in almost everything we do. And Tally Pro is a subscription where we wrap some features like removing the Tally branding, having custom domains, team collaboration in one premium package. It's priced at $29 a month. All right, so making Tally largely free. Make sure that there's no barriers to try it out.
This also creates positive word of mouth about our product, which results in more free users. And free users for us are great because they actually carry a Made with Tally badge on their forms. This is an example of a form page and of a thank you page where you can see that our product is really visible.
Now doing this, and because forms are viral by nature, a lot of respondents, so you create a form to share it with people, right? The respondents also get to see our brand and they discover Tally and they also turn into free users. About 3% of our free users converts to TallyPro users, which for now we have around 80,000 free customers and 3% of those are around 2,000 paying TallyPro users.
So how does the product actually fit into all of this? So we needed a product that has a broad enough value proposition and that offers a lot of value and offers it really fast to our users. And to do that we need to make sure that first of all we offer a lot of value for free but we also make it really really easy to use. So whenever we add a new feature
We make sure that we prioritize simplicity. This also limits the complexity of the product and lowers the amount of customer support, which is great because up till now we're still just a team of two. Besides that, what's really important for us is that we have a laser focus on customer support.
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