How Tally grew to $150k MRR in 5 years - Marie Martens

Speaker A: We basically waited too long to hire people and to grow the team and we were completely burned out. We have 6,000 paying customers now. We want to get to 10,000 customers and if we can reach that, I think we would be ready to sell Tally at one point.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome back to Indie Bytes, the podcast rhyming stories of fellow indie hackers in 15 minutes or less. Today I'm joined by Marie Martins, who is the co founder of Tally, a form builder she started with her partner Philip, now used by over half a million people and are over 150k.mrr. Marie was on the pod three years ago when they scaled to just 16,000 users and $8,000 mrr. In that episode we discussed the origin story, getting their first 100 users and how they've grown so quickly. I'll make sure I leave links to that in the description. But today we're going to be talking about how they've built such a robust business over the past few years. Things that have gone wrong, things that have gone well, and ultimately things that 15x in their revenue. But before we get into this episode, I would like to thank my sponsor, Email Octopus. Email Octopus are an email platform focused on affordability and ease of use without some of the bloated features that a lot of other email apps have so you can focus on shipping and growing your audience, which regular listeners will know is essential for growth in the early days if you start in your business. So to get started with an email platform that just gets out of the way, where you can contact up to 2,500 people for free, head to Email Ops for stock, or hit the link in the show notes. Marie, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Speaker A: Good. Wow, what an introduction. Yeah, no, really good. Ah, really happy to be back after three years.

Speaker B: I'm loving speaking to people that I've spoken to a few years ago to see their growth. Is it crazy to think that when we last spoke you were at just $8,000 mrr and now you're over 150 with a team in Belgium?

Speaker A: Yeah, crazy actually, because I think I mentioned this in the last podcast. Reaching 8 Ah K was a huge milestone because I think the one we celebrated like in a really big way was when we would reach enough MRR to have the same, you know, salary as we would do as two freelancers, you know, combined. So, and I think we reached that like shortly after our conversation. And that was life changing.

Speaker B: You know, it's interesting everyone has that goal of when I start my business and you start Seeing a bit of traction that you want to leave your jobs and replace your salaries and then build from that point. But then after that, what do you do? Have you just built yourself another job? What things do you put in place to make sure that what you've built is more enjoyable than your previous job with the salary? But, Marie, I want to ask you, your initial thought when starting Tally was how cool would it be if we could travel, work, create a sustainable business that pays the bills, that allows us to code on the beach? And your reference was wanting to build like a lifestyle business. How similar or different was that initial notion to where you are now?

Speaker A: Very different, I would say. I think a few reality checks happened along the way. The dream of building the lifestyle business. Well, obviously we managed to build a business and to make it profitable really early on, but it definitely changed into something else than coding on the beach. And then I would say, uh, since this year, we really shifted our ambition. We're going to the office every day from nine to six. So it's a completely different life than what I envisioned.

Speaker B: But do you think that you would be equally as happy and fulfilled if you did have that pure lifestyle business versus what doing now?

Speaker A: I mean, I think so. It would be a completely different life.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But it is kind of what we were dreaming of. I think just the reality check for us was if we want to build and grow a company like Tally, I mean, you can always keep it small. But if you want to make it really successful, you know, you have to grow it, you have to scale it.

Speaker B: So what was the switch in your mindset then? Because, like, I feel like you could have very easily, once you're at that sort of 1015 camera point, think, ah, uh, Philip, we're at a good place here. Maybe we can sort of ramp back, put it into maintenance mode, go and surf and chill on the beach, or actually, let's crank this up and we've got a really cool opportunity here.

Speaker A: I think the weird thing about bootstrapping and not having investors is you don't have that external pressure, but you kind of put it on yourself. And so for us, once we were kind of in this drive of building and growing it, it was really hard to snap out of it. We had actually two moments where we took a bit of a break, and that was when our two kids were born. I think we could have go into maintenance mode, but then there's this side inside of you. Like, you get those feature requests and, you know, people want to see different things. You feel like it is growing. What if, you know, and you, every time you kind of like evolve and you go to the next step and the next milestone and I guess it gets addictive and you just, you want to make it bigger, you want to make it better.

Speaker B: I wonder then how you've built this business to work for you and to maintain your happiness. Uh, where you've like steered away from that initial vision of the lifestyle, but now you've not got investors, you're building your own thing. What things have you put in place to make sure that this is a really enjoyable place for you to work and so your life's work can be fun.

Speaker A: So it took a while. I think after year two, we were still just with two people. We didn't hire anyone because we were very careful with the money that we had been earning and we basically waited too long to hire people and to grow the team and we were completely burned out and we were very far off. The initial idea of, you know, having a happy lifestyle business, it's been very hard for us to bootstrap it, to keep on growing it. And obviously, you know, the revenue graph always looks very pretty, but it's tough to keep things going. We were exhausted and I think that was kind of wake up call for us. Like, okay, like if we want to continue doing it, we need to start running it more professionally. We need to scale, we need to have a team. We cannot do everything ourselves. And I guess that kind of changed the mindset.

Speaker B: That's interesting. So, uh, you uh, ended up like having so much work on your plate as this was growing. Anything right, to alleviate some of this pressure with the amount of feature requests, customer support, let's hire. But we know that hiring isn't easy as you just find a person and um, bam, um, that alleviates all of your stress.

Speaker A: That was a big learning curve as well. So initially we wanted to build a remote team, you know, still from the idea of being able to travel and work. And so we hired two engineers. We wanted senior people because we felt like we don't have the time to educate. Right. We can onboard, but then we expect a lot of ownership. And so after few months we realized that the two engineers, that it was just not working. We had difficulties with communication just because it was a remote team with time zones, with planning, but also just, I guess with ownership and expecting like more than what we were getting out of it. We actually had to take the difficult decision to fire them and to start from scratch again. But it was kind of like the break that we needed. So we took it a bit more slowly, but the product kept on growing. So it was also a bit of a reminder for ourselves that, you know, nothing is really on fire. It's just the pressure that we put on ourselves. And then we'd found a really great office in Ghent. So we've been working from home for super long. Let's try to build a team here.

Speaker B: This is fascinating because typical advice would be to hire, uh, contractors hire remote. So the choice to rent a space in person, losing access to the global workforce and just focusing on locally, I didn't think that was a thing anymore.

Speaker A: It is. And it's actually, I see more and more companies kind of, you know, return to the office and I really, I never thought we would be one of them, but here we are. I think it also helped us personally to have more work life balance, you know, leave home, come to work. I know it's atypical, but it just kind of felt like what we needed to do.

Speaker B: It's nice to hear a alternative case study of this working because we do hear so much about remote work, that being the future. Now, I don't really speak to many people who run a startup. As a mother, I think what you're doing is very impressive. Marie, how's it been for you? What advice would you give to other female founders who might be wanting to start something but don't know how you manage your time, or what advice would you give to them?

Speaker A: Yeah, I would advise not to do it if you can choose. It's a horrible combination. Um, I'm really honest and transparent about that. Kids is not something you can always plan that easily. I'm 35. Philip is 36. We were in our early 30s when we started telly. And, uh, we always knew that we wanted to have kids and we kind of didn't want to delay kind of that dream just for work. But the thing is, you just don't know what you're getting yourself into if you don't have kids yet. And we thought we could combine it all and the reality is that we still struggle to do that. Kids take a lot of energy and take a lot of time. So now I would say if you have the budget, just outsource everything that you can, whether it's, you know, cleaning or cooking or anything that takes time, you know, away from work or quality time that you want to have with kids. So we have shifts. Uh, one week you have the morning shift and one. The other week you have the evening shifts. And it kind of switch Every switches every other week. That works for us because it means we can both kind of put in the hours that we want to do. Obviously we sacrifice time together because you just cannot have it all. You cannot be the perfect mother and the perfect founder and the perfect partner and the perfect friend. There's a lot of sacrifices.

Speaker B: I find this interesting because there's no handbook for this. No, there's not many people that have built a business as you have with their partner while also raising a young family. So kudos for you for doing it. Marie. We're talking about life and the business. I'm sure people want to know how the heck you've done it. This is very impressive to grow to half a million users. 150k. Mrr. Now in the first episode we recorded three years ago, we talked about your first users. You did your one to one outreach, did a product hunt, launch a bunch of product led growth. You wrote a lot of content. It's the playbook that we've heard time and time again. I wonder if we could fill in the gap, just maybe some growth channels that uh, you really sim work and have harnessed over the last couple of years.

Speaker A: So it's nothing crazy. Actually, you know what you just mentioned, we kind of needed that to get like our first thousand or two thousand users in and then kind of the product led growth started doing its thing. And I guess by really, really focusing on designing and building a really good user experience and just offering a very generous free tier which is something that at the time, well four years ago, not a lot of players were by doing that but really like sticking to those principles like Tally needs to be simple, Tally is free and Tally is also us. You know, we're bootstrapped. It's kind of our underdog story. By sticking to those three things, we kept on growing organically. And so a lot of effort has gone into obviously building the product, keep on improving it, talking to users, which is something we've been doing since day one and are still doing like in our slab group via ah, email, all kinds of channels. And you know, when you have a product people love to use, people also love sharing it and that has really helped us in growing. So our main growth channel is the product itself. You make a form it has made with Tally badge on it. Obviously forms are viral by nature. You make them to share with other people and that's how new people discover us. But by also having, you know, happy customers spreading the word about us by us building in public, people also kind of uh, you Know, started discovering us on social media, which then, you know, led into to more people discovering Tally trying it out. More people trying it out means more forms with our branding because, you know, it is largely free. And that's kind of how the flywheel keeps. Keeps on turning. And we've been doing that for the past four years. It's only since this year that we decided to look into alternative ways of growing and, you know, can we even speed up the growth? And so we started with influencer marketing a few months ago because it kind of felt natural, like people were already creating content about Tally and how can we, you know, amplify that? And then also looking into paid, literally running ads. Uh, we kind of want to try out everything. Like, nothing is a no go. I think in the beginning we were a bit more skeptical. You know, we're not going to run ads. Everything needs to be organic. And now I feel like we should just try everything and see what sticks.

Speaker B: I love that it's only now you're looking into alternative marketing and growth methods. Having just spent the last four years of building a really good product and get that flywheel going, I'm wondering then, how are you approaching product to make it as good as it can be? So when people do land on Tally. So also, have you. What's the tally.com domain? Have you investigated buying it or is it.

Speaker A: Yeah, they're asking a lot of money. So, um, we don't have it yet. No.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. Okay. So tally.com is not even being used.

Speaker A: No. No. But someone owns it. Yeah. And they know we want it and

Speaker B: they know the size of your business. That's some of the downsides of sharing some of these numbers.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So what are they asking for? Like.

Speaker A: Oh, I think it was like a million.

Speaker B: And the trouble is, Marie, like, the more you, like, share your growth, the more that price is just going to go up because you're the clearest buyer for it.

Speaker A: Yeah. That's the downside of. Of building in public.

Speaker B: Yeah. Why don't you sort of stop sharing this stuff? It was quite easy to find your current revenue. Just go on Twitter.

Speaker A: We doubted a bit last year, I think also because the audience started growing. And in the beginning, I didn't really realize that people were actually reading this post. You know, we were kind of just doing it for ourselves a bit. It was a bit of a diary. Um, and obviously the audience grew and as the team size stayed small, but the revenue number went up, people started, you know, thinking, like, wait, is that what they earn every Month and obviously that's just revenue. There's also costs involved and so on. So it became a bit uncommon, comfortable. But then I thought, you know what, this is kind of what defines us. We've been doing this since our first €100 or dollar so why would we stop now?

Speaker B: Right, Yeah. I respect you for still doing it. I spoke to Arvid a couple of weeks ago who is on the pod and he's a big advocate of building in public but even he's choosing not to share his numbers, especially remedy numbers because they get misconstrued. He's happy to take the building public approach of these are the experiments. I'm trying these results of the experiments rather than here is my revenue.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the sad thing is that people always want to know the revenue.

Speaker B: The initial question was about like your product and when people are actually landing on the site, what are you doing to stand out where ultimately the product is really simple to form.

Speaker A: I think for us the biggest challenge was how can we keep it simple. So one of the reasons why we built Tally is because you have a lot of very bloated form builders, you know, packed with functionality, really powerful but they're the not fun to use. So how can we, as we kept on growing and kept on adding features, how can we still keep it very clean and very simple? And we try to prioritize like improvements over new features because it easily gets just difficult to use I would say.

Speaker B: So Maria, I'm curious now then what, what does the future go for you? How big do you want to build this thing? Do you want an empire again where you've got loads of people? Do you want to raise funding? Do you want to exit and continue your life with your kids? What's the plan here?

Speaker A: We have 6,000 paying customers now we want to get to 10,000 customers and we hope to do that over the next four years. And if we can reach that, I think we would be ready to sell tele at one point. So we're not going to do this indefinitely but for us we feel like there's a lot of room to grow and we feel very challenged by that and we want to try this. I think we're pretty good at going from zero to one but now we're in completely different waters so that's like the challenge for us.

Speaker B: Well M. Maria, I wish you the uh, success in that and I look forward to speaking to you in a few years time when you've then growed 15x revenue again. Now I end every episode on three recommendations, a book, a podcast, and indie hacker. Marie, what have you got for me?

Speaker A: I think my podcast is. It's Lenny's. Lenny's Podcast. Uh, now, Indie Hackers, I would say probably Ollie. Well, Oliver Meekings, who's running Sendra. I haven't been reading a lot of books, but I would say everything from First Round Capital, First Round review, I found super interesting.

Speaker B: Marie, superb recommendations. Thank you so much for coming back on this episode of Indie Bytes.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for the invite.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Indie Bytes. As always, thank you to my sponsor, email Octopus, and I will see you in the next episode.