I Make $5M/Year Giving My SaaS Away for Free

👋 Apply to join Profitable Founder Community: tally.so/r/dWZ5Jz

Marie and Philip (her co-founder and life partner) launched Tally, a free form builder, from their living room during COVID lockdowns.

Five years later, they hit $5M ARR with just 10 people and zero funding.

In this episode, Mari shares how giving their product away for free became their biggest growth engine, why she said no to their most requested feature for 5 years, and the unexpected channel that 5x'd their revenue almost overnight.

Try Tally for Free: tally.cello.so/QZlNWuM7kjG
Find Marie on X: x.com/MarieMartens

👉 Try Distribb for Free: distribb.io

Chapters:

0:00 - Intro
1:04 - From corporate job to startup life
6:44 - The failed startup before Tally
9:43 - How Tally was born during COVID
11:08 - Why simplicity is their biggest edge
13:11 - The freemium flywheel that drives growth
15:28 - How they decide what to build
17:46 - Getting real feedback from users
22:41 - Building in public: does it actually help?
25:37 - Key lessons from 5 years of building
28:39 - The channel that changed everything
32:35 - Making freemium actually work
38:28 - What they would do differently
42:27 - Building a team after years as a duo
47:31 - The future of Tally and the SaaS apocalypse
50:24 - How to protect your SaaS from AI

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We have like 1.8 million users, and there's sixteen thousand paying users.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

This is Marie. She just hit five million a year with her SAS study, but it wasn't an overnight success.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

We did everything ourselves for three years, I would say, before we hired someone in the first years, you know, I had two pregnancies. I wasn't able to work to put in the hours that I can right now.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

It took them a year to reach 5kmr, another one to reach 10kmr, and then something changed.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Now you hear everyone talking about the SAS of Clips, and we're not gonna exist anymore. We're kind of seeing the opposite thing for now.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

They went from 1 million a year to 5 million a year in the past 12 months, thanks to one thing. In this episode, you will discover the distribution flywheel that got tally to 1 million a year. Why you should stop adding features to your product right now, and the one thing that 5x their revenue almost overnight. So, Mari, in 2022, you said we launched Tali a couple months ago before a baby girl was born. The dream was to build a sustainable lifestyle business to provide for our future family. She just turned two, and we are paying the bills with our own bootstrap company. Back in the day, I think you were making in between 30 to 40 KMR. Today you make 10 times more, 400k. So, my question, and I think a lot of people will want to ask you that how does it feel to have built such a startup and be successful?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Oh wow, I completely forgot about that. Um, that I've that I've written that. That's I mean, it's pretty special. I think that was one of the most um special moments in in uh in this journey. Uh, how does it feel? I think that describes it pretty well. You know, we just had this idea of what if we can become one of those successful indie hackers that can just make a living out of building a product, which is just something we like to do. And when I say we, I mean uh Philip and I. Philip is my technical co-founder, also partner in life. Um and it's just this dream we had of what if we can make money out of building, you know, a product and having a recurring income and not become having to become consultants and sell our time, but just you know, build something, which is something we both enjoyed doing. Um, so that was the idea behind it. Uh, and the biggest goal uh at the time was to be able to live and pay the bills with two people. And indeed, we had just started started building our family as well. We we have two kids now. Um so we had this number in mind: like, what if we could make like 10k or 20k a month? Um, that would be more than what we earned at the time. Um, and we could pay the bills and we're our own balls, and we can travel, and we can become digital nomads and go to Bali. That was the plan at the time. Um it turned out quite differently, but the business definitely became more successful than we could have ever uh imagined. Um we're a bit in a different situation right now. We have a team, you know, we go to the office every day. Um there's there's 10 people now working on tally. Uh yeah, we just reached 5 million ARR, so it's uh things have changed. Um, and it's definitely still as exciting, but it's it became different. You know, I think we're more like building a company now instead of only building a product with with just people, uh, with just two people. Um and that also brings different challenges. But um yeah, I I did not expect to be here today uh when I was writing that um that article in in 2020.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Well, let's talk about your background then. Like what did you do actually before starting tally?

SPEAKER_01 4:09

I I'm um I studied marketing uh and I worked, you know, when you graduate in Belgium. I'm from um I live in Belgium. Uh I just went to work for like the biggest uh media company in Belgium, which which at the time seemed like a great opportunity. Um so yeah, big corporate, um started at the bottom, you know, like kind of climbed my way up there, did all kinds of different different jobs, um, had a lot of fun, but then also realized that the whole corporate thing was not really uh not really my vibe, and then ended up more in the tech tech community. Um started working for a digital product studio, so basically a company that builds mobile applications at the time and and and websites and and platforms for um smaller and bigger companies. Um worked there for a bit, basically surrounded by 100 engineers, um, but also on the marketing side then. Um and when I met Philip, I think it was in 2017, um, he was building another startup. So he's a full-stack engineer. Um also, you know, designs, builds, uh, owns everything product-wise. Um, we kind of thought, like, hey, you know, we maybe have complementary skills, um, or both kind of dreamers by nature. Like, what if we can do something together and make a living out of that? And that's kind of how I ended up in the startup space. Um, so it's not like I've built a lot of other products before. I've always just had a pretty regular job, but I always liked um creating things and starting from scratch and and like imagining, you know, how this ID could look like and how to build it, and so always been pretty pretty passionate about that. So I um I think I felt pretty attracted to to startups in general, but never really had the the balls to make the jump. Uh and Philip did. He's been building since he was 11, been coding, has had tons of side projects, startups. Um so yeah, I guess we both had a bit of a we started quite late, you know. Uh I think we were we were past our past 30 already when when we started Tally. Um, so we both had quite some experience, but in different fields. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Was Tally the first project you've built together?

SPEAKER_01 6:48

No, no. Um the the whole idea was uh we were gonna build a marketplace that connects hotels and travel influencers to help like small boutique hotels to market their properties and also to help travel influencers to you know make money and have collaborations and travel. So that was the idea. It was called Hotspot. We had the idea when we were traveling, uh we were in Mexico uh years ago uh on a beach, and you know, as you do when you're on the holiday, like dreaming about how our lives could look like, um and becoming a digital nomad and moving to Bali. I don't know if you're still located located, but what that was the dream at the time. Uh, and we thought this is the perfect project to do that. Um, but we both still had our other full-time job, so we started as a side project, and then we said if we can find, I think we said if we can find 100 hotels that would like it, so we just send um a form actually. Um, if they would like it, like if they would be interested in in the ID, then we're gonna build it. And so we came back, we like scraped Instagram, made the list, uh, pitched the ID, and then we had quickly had like over 100 hotels that were interested, but you know, just yeah, it was pretty naive as well, you know, the way we validated it at the time. But anyway, um we started building it as a as a side project. Um, and at one point we had uh yeah, we had some paying customers. Um, we figured out some ways to do cold outreach and to get new ones and to get hotels, and you know, we thought like, hey, maybe um we can make this into into a bigger thing. And then I decided to quit my job. Uh Philip was then also already working full-time on it. Um, but that was beginning 2020. COVID happened, um, and we were actually on our way to Bali. So we did a we had like a pit stop in Bangkok. We were there for a week or two, and then all the borders closed. Um, and we kind of had to decide like what do we do? Uh and we just jumped, there was like one more plane, we went back to Belgium, and then we went into lockdown for the next year. Uh, don't really remember how long it took exactly. And so we lost customers. Yeah, we couldn't sell to anyone, all the hotels were closed, no one was traveling. And in the beginning, we thought, like, how long can this take? We'll just work a bit more behind the scenes, and in a few months, you know, when the market recovers and the borders open again, we will uh we will be ready, which you know obviously didn't happen. And then by summer we said, okay, we need to do something else. So then on Fridays, we would we would like order cocktails. It was something you could do back in in during COVID because we couldn't leave the house, but they were like bars delivering cocktails at home. So we tr decided to try that. And then we had like brainstorms with some alcohol. Uh, and at one one day, Tally came up. We're like talking about forms and and how we've used a lot of forms, or we've used forms for Hotspot as well. And I had used like HubSpot and Typeform and Google Forms, and you know, either like or free, uh, but we didn't like the design, or really loved products like Typeform, but pretty expensive at the time. So we thought, what if there's something like uh like the notion of forms? Because we also started using Notion and we loved, still do uh loved Notion at the time. What if there's like a simple uh form builder that basically goes in this very outdated industry, but just makes it simpler and makes it more attractive and innovates on pricing and new X. So that was the idea. Um, the initial idea was a lot more complex as well. We were gonna build a CRM and we thought that just the form builder would not cut it. But then we started building, and we said, okay, let's just keep it simple and see where we get. And uh yeah, we're five years later and we're still just building uh forms.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

So this idea of keeping things simple is still something that you have, you're always against building new features, or you challenge the fact that it's important or not to build new features. What is it so important for you to keep it simple?

SPEAKER_01 11:27

It it's kind of embedded in everything we do, and I think it comes from the idea of not wanting to have a big team. Uh so you know, it was just us two building for a while. Now we're a team of 10, but we don't really see the team growing a lot anymore. So we keep it intentionally small. I also believe once you have more than 10 people, you know, the job kind of changes, there's different dynamics, need to manage, and so on. And we just like to build. So so when you have a small team, things need to be simple, especially if you want to serve. Um, you know, we're we're getting close to two million people using tally uh with just a team of 10 people behind it. So I think keeping things simple just enabled us to do more with less with less resources. Um and it it also just allows us to move a bit faster and and it makes it easier to make decisions. Um but the simplicity is also USP of tally. You know, the design is very simple. We don't want to like bombard you with all these features that you're not gonna use. Um the pricing is very simple, it's either free or you pay 29. Um, there's not that much uh in between. Um, the way we communicate is very simple, simply because um, you know, there was no Chat GPT or Claude at the time, so it was all just me writing it. But then also keeping things the product simple made sure that we had less customer support, right? Um, because we offer support to all our users, also the free ones. And if you want to do that with a small team, you know, it the product needs to be mainly self-serve. Um and then probably the most most important one is is we we built tally and we we chose forms because they are viral by nature. Um and you make forms to share with someone else, and that's our biggest growth engine, right? And so if you want to compete in the super competitive market as just a bootstrapped you know duo without without any marketing budgets, um, we had to find our edge somewhere else. And one is in pricing, right? So we offer like unlimited forms for free, which is something that not a lot of people uh and submissions for free, which is something that not a lot of people players were doing at the time. But also the the builder by itself is looks pretty different, you know, it's very notion-like, you just type and you you insert blogs. And so there's very little friction. It's really easy to create your first form, and that's pretty important if we want to we want to get new users in, we want to show them the value that they get as fast as possible, and then they share forms, they talk about it, and and that's how we grow. So it's kind of core in everything, in everything we do. Um, so we try to keep keep things simple. And at the same time, I think it's also the hardest thing to do. Like we have if we have a lot of discussions, if you know, it's really easy to go on these side quests or to build something that was, you know, you might think it will work, but you're not really sure, or you'll spend the three days on automating something that you know might not really be necessary. So in everything we do, we're like, is this really useful? Is this the one thing that will move the needle today? And how can we simplify it? Like, how can we take the first most simple step? So it just it just helps us in how we work, how we build, how we sell.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Quick one. I'm looking for 30 founders already doing between 5k to 50k MRR who want to push their SaaS to 100k MRR together. I'm launching Profitable Founder Community, weekly group calls, monthly QA with founders who already reached that goal, and a private community for daily conversation. The goal is to build a mastermind of hungry founders who will push each other to reach that goal. The first batch is capped to 30 founders only. So if you're in, you can already apply by clicking on the link in the description. And I will get back to you when the first batch is ready. Now back to the episode. I saw today that you launched a new feature, which is uh tally to PDF. So in the same ID, how do you decide what features you should build or not?

SPEAKER_01 15:37

This is a funny one because I said no to this feature for five years. I'm like PDFs, who uses PDFs? Um, but it was the most requested feature uh ever. Uh so apparently a lot of people uh want the form submissions to be turned into a PDF. You can use it then. I mean it it opens up a lot of a lot of use cases, you know. You can create contracts, uh anything like that. Um how do we decide? We usually so the simplicity comes back. We're like, okay, can we keep it simple? Like, can we ship the simple version in a week or two? Um, and and how do we do that? Can we offer it for free? Because that is usually that is how we grow. We try to offer as much value as possible for free. Some features are too expensive, right, to offer for free. Um, and then also does it fit into Tally's vision of we just want to build the simplest form builder out there. We don't necessarily want to become a suite of tools where you can do all kinds of things like e-signing, uh, you know, and so on. That's that's not the idea. We just want to build the best possible form build. And actually, the PDF is a bit of an exception there because I felt like it's not really a core form building feature. You know, there's other tools for that. You can use Zapia or Make or NA10, and you just you can build it yourself. Um but the fourth thing we listen to is the users. Uh, and if it's uh requested by the users, which this one was has been requested thousands of times, um, yeah, it means that they they they want it. And so it's a combination of all those things um that help us decide on on the roadmap. Um but the most important thing is does it come back in in customer support tickets? You know, has it been requested? We have this public upvoting board. Um and by now we have years of data, so we we know pretty well what what to build and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

So there is something really complicated for someone who starts a SaaS is to get actually feedback from the customers. Like that's something that we all know we should do, but it's really hard to get them. It's hard to get them on a call, it's hard to contact them. How did you find the secret for that?

SPEAKER_01 18:07

I don't know if it's the hardest thing. I just think it's something that a lot of people maybe don't want to do because it just also takes a lot of time and energy, and it's often very confronting, right? Sometimes you're building in this bubble and you're like, I have this great idea, and then you know, someone just takes it down with one sentence of feedback. It's also not very fun. But it it's crucial, and I think to know if you're building the right thing for us. We started by just sending DMs to people on Twitter, people we found on Product Hunt, people we found on indie hackers, like you know, people that we thought might might be builders or founders or designers or might be interested in this type of product. And we would just ask for feedback. Um, obviously, because the product was free, that was pretty easy because anyone can just enter. Um and then the people who replied, I would just um ask them to join our Slack channel. And so in the first three years of Tally, anyone who had used the product could join our Slack channel. Um, and that was for us the easiest way to just talk to people one-on-one. Also do it a bit on at scale because going on phone calls is is is quite time consuming. Not everyone wants to, you know, be on a video call or pick up the phone. So we thought that Slack would be the best medium. Uh people would join, and then we would say, like, hey, what did you think? Did you try it out? Um, and then they would give us feedback, and then we would just build whatever they ask. And the next day we would be like, Hey, you know, John, it's here, it's live. And then people would be amazed, right? Because, oh, like this actually just happened. Um, people would use Typeform or Google Forms. I don't know if you've ever tried to contact the the support team of of those companies, it's impossible. I I don't know, you know, they might not even exist, they're just impossible. And so this like actually listening and acting on it, I think helped people realize like, oh, they're actually listening to the feedback. Uh and that also turned the early users really in in promoters, so they would share the word and they would tell their friends and their colleagues. Um, and so we we just we kept on doing that for I think it was the first three years. So we would answer everyone on Slack, on email, via DM, on any channel, um ourselves within the hour if we were awake. Um and then we would keep manually track of everything those people said, so there was no uh uploading because we were really scared to lose context. So we just had this database in Notion, and I would say, Oh, talk to this person. He also mentioned that he would like more customization options, right? Uh okay, talk to this other person today, and so this um for years uh and that shaped the roadmap, and now we would just ship whatever was being requested, and if it of course fitted into, you know, um is it simple? Can we offer it for free, and so on, into our criteria? Um, and and I think that's how we managed to get a lot of feedback, and we still do. Um after year three, it became too much because there's so many people asking stuff, and you get like so overwhelmed that you also cannot build anymore. You also constantly feel like you're doing a bad job because you only hear the the negative feedback. Um, so then we decided to close the Slack channel. We still have it. Um, we're actually thinking of reopening it now that there's a team. So there's like three or four thousand people in it. We still share everything with them, uh we still ask for feedback. But we closed it for new users because it just turned into this 24-7 live chat, and that was also not you know not sustainable for us.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Do you offer anything in this Slack channel or is like purely about Tally and how to improve Tally?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

It's just this. Yeah. Um, we do we have we have beta users in there, so they get like early access. Um, but it's it's purely um what did you build with Tally? Uh us saying like, hey, this is new, this is what we're working on. Um, we're doing some meetups now, you know. Is there anyone based in London because we're going to London? It's it's simply this. Um only Tally, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

But you embraced the building public since the beginning. On your blog, we can read uh all the new milestone. For example, there's a blog post right now about what you did from uh four to five million ARR. Is it something you think that helps you get these uh people who are actually interested enough to go into Slack and ask you for features, or do you think this is completely separated?

SPEAKER_01 23:13

I think it might have helped a bit, but I don't think it was the main driver. Um, I the building in public is something we did just because it was pretty common in like on indiehackers.com that you would just share your milestones and what you learned, and that's how we started. So it was in the beginning, it was more like a way of giving back. Like we would also only post it on on the Indie Hackers platform. I was I was not on Twitter, I was not on LinkedIn. It was only after a while that I thought, hey, maybe this can be useful content for for other people as well. So it was more like a way of documenting the journey. And I kind of like the idea of keeping a blog and then reading back, you know, uh years later. Um I do think, and especially today, it creates this more like transparency and trust, right? Because we do share a lot, um, and you kind of take users on your journey. So it might have it might have helped, but I I think the thing that helped more was that the product was free. Um, that the product itself is the biggest acquisition channel, right? Like you discovered Tally through filling out a tally form. And then us just like obsessively talking to users and and listening. I think that helped more than than the building in public. Um I think building in public serves a different purpose, like it helped us grow an audience. Um, it it definitely helped us find new users. Um, but it it's I don't think it gave us more feedback than we than we would have had. It's more like our way to to share the story. You could see it as a way of content marketing as well, right? We're building a startup, someone else might be doing this and might be a few steps ahead or behind. Um, and it might be useful for them. Um, but I I think it helps with it helps with transparency, and for us it also helped to differentiate us a bit. Like, you know, we're more like the underdog, we're the SMAT team, we're bootstrap. There's just not that many similar form builders um out there. So it just kind of like reinforces the the story and the fact that you know we're different than than some of the other forum builders out there.

unknown 25:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

So under my eyes right now, I have your MRR chart, and I want to talk about two things: the before 2025 and after 2025. The before 2025 is pretty is a stable growth, kind of still amazing growth. I want to know what were the biggest key lessons that you got from all these years of building tally. It can be like how to register, how you found a distribution channel or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Yeah, I I think the the the boring thing about the Tally story is that it's a lot of the same. And I think the the biggest thing we learned is that not that many people stick around for five or ten years, you know, to see the growth happening. I think our it's not an overnight success, it's not a, you know, you've interviewed people, they go from zero to ten million in in a month. It it's nothing like that, right? It's it's five million in five years. Uh, and most of that revenue was was generated in the last two years. Um I think what we learned is that the most important thing was to be a bit stubborn and to show up every day and to keep on doing what we're doing. And we we really religiously believed in this viral loop that we created, which is also showing off now. It's like the more people use tally, the more we can offer for free. Uh, the more people will discover tally, will also create forms, and that's just how we grow. It's this, it's this product-let growth, you know, it's this flywheel that can only get bigger. It's really hard to stop something like that. And so I think that's the power of it. Um, and what we learned is that it's really important for us to stick to our principles of keeping things simple, but also keeping it largely free. So the good thing about not having investors on board is that we never raise prices and we always kept on offering a lot of value for free, even when we were not really making a lot of money. And I think that's just compounding and it has helped us grow. But it's really sticking to that, like to the simplicity of tally is simple, tally is free, and tally is us. You know, it's us building in public, it's being transparent, it's it's sharing everything. And it's only building something that that we truly believe in. So whenever we do something that doesn't feel 100% right, it usually also doesn't work. So it's like just learning to stick to the plan, execute it, uh, and and try to try to keep up as long as possible. Um, I think that's what helped us. There hasn't been like acquisition channel-wise. We've tried a few things. We tried ads, didn't really work for us. We didn't really invest in a ZEO from the start, which I think was a was a mistake. Um and and obviously the biggest change in in what happened to Tally and the growth has been uh LLM starting to recommend us. Uh so that's something we saw early 2025, I guess, um maybe March 2025, when we suddenly saw more and more people mentioning, hey, we found you through ChatGPT. And we thought, hey, that's interesting. Like, how did that happen? And we have this very simple um onboarding flow where we just ask, Who are you and where did you find us? Right. And we just said, let's just add AI and let's see. And like we saw more and more people clicking it. And then we said, okay, let's add like an extra field. Like, if they click AI, could you just share a bit more? Like, what's the prompt you use? Which which AI assistant were you using? And then we saw this massive peak in it, was like self-attributed data, just people mentioning mostly Chat GPT at the time. And then we thought, oh, how does this happen? Right. And we learned it was a combination of us being um very active on social media, but also Reddit throughout the years. Like we've been very actively working on social listening and trying to pitch tally in relevant conversations, mostly on forums, mostly on Reddit. And so that kind of apparently, you know, uh kind of worked for us. And then we had this super elaborate help center that it wasn't really optimized for search or anything like that. It just was made from the idea of we don't want to answer any question twice, right? Like the product needs to be simple, and if we get questions, it needs to be documented in the help center. And so it became quite of a uh a big chunk of content already. And those pages were very um, you know, pretty dry. They're just to just explain how everything works, and those were starting to be uh be picked up. So that I think that's the moment where we thought, hey, maybe we should just look, how does this work? Like, how do you optimize for for ChatGPT? And I think a lot of it was was also more like basic SEO stuff that we never really thought about, like just make sure the headings are fine and the URLs are okay, and just like the really basic stuff. And that came only really late for us. So I started focusing on that a bit more, and then just saw um yeah, growth increased a lot, especially um it started with ChatGPT, but now Claude is getting a lot more uh users, and we just see our graphs just follow their new releases, right? Like suddenly we saw Cloud popping up, and now that is becoming the biggest one. Um and it it for us it's now just learning like, okay, what can we do as a bootstrap team compared to like we have the organic growth, and that will keep on going, and that will always be the strongest, the strength behind Tally. But then, you know, we have competitors like a Jotform, they have a content team, I believe. It's more than 100 people. There's no real point in competing with them, but then we learned, like, oh, we can just write one simple page. Um, maybe we find some content gaps, and then it will it will get picked up by LLM. So somehow the game kind of changed. And so that's that's stuff we you know, we're working on more uh right now. Um while before it was really like organic growth, building in public, me also just doing support. Uh now there's a support team, right? Now there's some engineers, so there's a bit more time to think about about the next steps uh for Tally. Um I think that has been the biggest, biggest change, but still just powered by all the free users that keep on making forms and that that keep on helping us grow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

So a lot of people say that freemium are a really bad idea for a lot of SaaS. And for you especially, it's a really good one because, as you say, it's kind of an organic word of mouth because people share form, and there is uh, I forgot the sentence, but created by uh Tally, for example, yeah at the bottom. And this alone is your biggest uh distribution channel, or before LLM maybe.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah. So that is that's it. Um and and yeah, sorry, um, no, go ahead. Yeah, it it uh it is it is uh and and I think to be able to to make that work, you need to go full in on the on the freemium, right? You need to have an actual free tier. It cannot be like try it for one day and then put the credit card. Like there's none of that. There's no, you don't even need to create an account um if you start using tally. If you just go, you've never used it, you go to tally.so. You can immediately build a form. It's just there, right? So you immediately see what it can do. And then if you want to publish it, you create an account, but there's no there's no credit card, there's no long questionnaire, you know, there's nothing like that. You're just in. Um, and and and it is it has a very generous free tier. And I think those two things are really important to be able to have the product-led growth. Um, and obviously, forms being viral by nature, you know, you have the same with um with websites, for example, you know, or you build a lovable app, you know, you'll also see the made-with lovable badge um in there. And that little badge is has been responsible for for most of our um most of our growth. And I truly believe that we would not been able to grow that fast without the freemium, um, because that would have required uh that would also mean we would compete with all the big players and they have big teams, big budgets. Um it would have meant probably raising money, um, you know, paying ads, doing doing a lot of things that we also just didn't really want to do.

unknown 34:49

Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

Well, I think it's one of the most generous, maybe the most generous actually, freemium on internet, because actually, yeah, you can do a lot of things on it. Um, how do you maintain that actually? You say that the paid user kind of pay for the freemium. How do you keep this uh balance and how do you stay actually profitable with that? If someone wants to try a freemium on Issaa's tomorrow, for example.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Yeah. So for us, um the economics uh still work, right? You think we have like 1.8 million users, and there's 16,000 paying users um right now. So as long as we uh we can offer support uh with with a small team to um to that big of a user base, it's okay. As well, um building and and uh hosting a product like Tally, like we our I think for a long time our biggest bill was like our Google Cloud bill in the in the first years, and it was I think it was less than a thousand euros. So Tally was super profitable from the start. Um we've been very uh careful with spending money. So if you do want to offer that much for free, you know, we did everything ourselves for you know three years, I would say, before we hired someone. Uh so we did invest um you know a lot of time and and resources into it. Um we haven't spent on big marketing campaigns or anything like that. We we still don't have a designer, uh, for example, in the team. Uh we launched with we didn't have a website, uh, it was just the builder. So you just go straight into the builder. Um, we didn't have any any branding. I think we we used like this free illustration kit that we found online for I think we reused it until we had 1 million uh ARR. So just being very careful with with spending uh and and you know being being patient on that front. Um, and then obviously we did start seeing the effect of the free users spreading the product, more free users coming in, and we didn't have to do anything for that. And we realized that 2% of those free users would convert to TallyPro, which is how we make money. So for us, you know, the more people come in, um, the better. And we just take a small percentage of that, and that's how we how we grow, how we make money, how we uh, you know, how we can build, how we can build a team. Um, so I think it's a bit of a it's a bit of a conviction as well, like you know, it's just the type of product that we want to build. I think if you want to grow faster or make more money faster, it's probably not the smartest thing to do. Um if your product um, you know, if you're selling to enterprises or you need um compliance from day one, right? You won't be, or you need a sales team, you won't be able to bootstrap it, or you won't be able to offer it for free. Um so I think it really depends on the type of product and and the industry you're in as well. I don't think you can apply this model to anyone, like it needs to be the right product if you would like to copy the playbook. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

And if you could right now talk to Marie and Philippe from 2020, is there anything that you could tell them right now to make it faster? Or like be successful faster, or like have a better product faster, or whatever?

SPEAKER_01 38:43

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Um, I think we the the special thing about us is that also the phase in our lives that we were in. You know, we had we have a a two and a five-year-old, so they were both born uh during uh, you know, after we launched Tally. And so it also means that in the first years, you know, I had two pregnancies. I wasn't able to work or to put in the hours that I that I can right now. Um and I think one thing we did learn is that it's not that easy to combine a family with a with a startup. And the more hours you put in, the faster you will grow. I'm I'm super convinced of that. Even though we have built this organic uh flywheel, it's just the more things you can try on a day, uh and and and the more yeah, just the more time you put in. It's simply anyone can build right now, but you need to put in the hours uh to be able to uh to be able to grow. Um, and I think that's something we already knew back then that we just made it a bit more difficult because we want to do everything at the same time, um, which wasn't the most sustainable situation. I'm really glad that we managed to do, and there's a lot more structure right now, and and we manage. Um, but you need to be able to go full in. Uh, and I think then you can grow faster. And I think part of the reason why we were slower is because we did struggle with with time and energy and being new parents and being both of us in the business, right? Uh in the in the first years. And you kind of see that in the in the graph as well. Um, so I think that's one thing, but it's not something I would change, it's just, you know, you're naive as uh as a first-time partner, you have no idea. Um anything else? I think I would invest in SAO probably earlier and just be a bit more aware of of that. Um and I would also hire sooner. Like we waited very long. We basically burned out and then hired our first customer support manager. Um I think after two and a half or three years. And of course, you know, there was not that much money coming in, but we could afford someone. I think to just we just got used to just building by ourselves, and we were not sure how it would go, like having a team or remote team or local. I don't know, those are things we weren't thinking about. So that took a while. Um, and yeah, I think we should have taken that step a bit earlier, uh, probably uh to have more headspace.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

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SPEAKER_01 42:38

Yeah, so the first person was Richard, and he was basically he was in that Slack channel that I mentioned before, and he was already helping out people. So he was basically doing the job, and we just started paying him for it. Like that was as as simple as it was. Um, we noticed there was like this one really difficult edge case that the user was struggling with, and he found the solution, and it was something we hadn't thought of. And I remember Philip saying, like, hey, this guy on Slack, like, did you see his answer? That's pretty smart. And then, you know, the day when we decided we need someone, we just offered Richard uh a job, and he he we're glad he uh he took it. So that was the first person. Um so it was first customer support, and then we tried um hiring engineers. Uh, engineers in Belgium are are quite expensive. So first we just looked for people, I think it was on on Twitter and also on Upwork, um, and we found like uh we found someone, well, we found two people um at the time, and we thought, okay, we'll just we'll just try and see how it goes. And it was quite difficult for us. Like we had never had a remote team before, like we were always used to working in office. Obviously, there's also us two. Living together and talking about everything. And then suddenly, you know, there's like more people in the team. So that was quite difficult. I think also communication-wise, expectation-wise. And after a few months, we were like, this model doesn't really work for us. Um, and then we decided to make it was actually like this big switch. We were like, okay, we just want to work with people together, like in-house. Um, but we didn't have an office at the time. And so where I'm sitting now, it's it's like this startup campus that opened in the in the city where we lived, and it was just the right timing. So we joined uh joined here, and then we hired um well, we had hired more support uh people, um, and then also uh actually a friend who was a full-stack engineer. Uh, he joined us. Um, and then now we are with you know, three engineers. It's still Philip and myself. We have one marketing manager uh who joined a few months ago, um, and then a support team of four people. Uh, and that's kind of how the team shaped. But so the first hire was customer support. Then we tried some remote engineers, found it really difficult. And now the engineering team is um here with us in Ghent and the marketing manager as well. And the support team is spread around the world because we need to cover the different time zones. And and we learned that for us, this is like it's easier when we're all at the same table and you know, we're just talking and we we something comes up over lunch or at the coffee machine. Um, we never work from home, we come to the office every day. So it's completely different than the life we envisioned, you know, like coding on the beach and um living in Bali, or at least that's that's the the the dream I had. Um and now we just yeah, we drop the kids off at school, we go to work, uh we pick them back up, and it's it it it changed a lot. Um but I I I think it's it's uh for the better. Um it brought us more structure. Um, and now the team, some people have been there for one or two years, and and you know, the next goal is like how can we make the how can we make ourselves a bit less important, right? Like for a very long time, everything that was marketing or ops was just me, and then everything product was Philip, um which is also something we cannot keep up uh for for that many more years. Um so yeah, trying to find people that are better at all these things than than ourselves, um, and trying to build this little you know tally machine uh of people that love love you know building something uh that is used by a lot of people that love to put in and you know, that have a good eye for detail and and for design and that care, you know, as as much as we do. So it's it's not always easy to find the right people. Um I think today also with the help of AI tools, it you know, you can do so much with such a small team. So actually, I feel like with a team of 10, yeah, I I don't think we ever need to hire hire a lot more people, you know. We uh think we have our uh our team set. Um and it I think it you know the team being small is also kind of our strength uh nowadays, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:34

Yeah, I believe so. What is the future of uh Tally? Because in I think the 12 past months you made more revenue than you did in the years before, since the beginning. So you have this exponential growth um thanks to LLM, but also with all the work that you did before. So, what is the future for Tally? How do you see Tali in the next few years?

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Yeah, good question. I I I find it lately, I find it a hard one to answer because the world is changing so fast, it's maybe a bit of a cringe answer. Um so I'm not sure what will happen. What we what we're seeing right now is that that AI, especially you know, people vibe coding, it's actually helping us in a positive way. You know, you hear everyone talking about the SaaS, apocalypse, and we're not gonna exist anymore. But you know, we're kind of seeing the opposite thing for now, where a lot of people are building products and a lot of people just want a simple form to plug in, you know, and don't necessarily want to build the whole back end behind that. So that's working in our favor. Uh the same thing as you know, the LLMs uh picking us up. So I do think we will be able to continue the grow trend for for a while. Um, we're hoping to get to seven million, you know, by the end of this year, um, beginning of next year. And then we'll see. Um I think as long as we enjoy what we do and as long as the model keeps working, then we'll keep on uh keep on building tally. Um I think the biggest challenge this year was to build the team. Um we're almost there. Um and next year we'll see. I I always think I see us, you know, um building to 10 million, which always seemed kind of uh like the biggest milestone or or um that we could reach. And then we'll see. So that's definitely uh a couple of more years. Um, but it's it's hard to say. Like I stopped doing uh big announcements uh about about the future because it it really changes every year. Um so so not sure, but I I do feel like we uh you know we can continue the growth for uh for for a while, at least I hope.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

Do you do anything right now to prepare the future? Because you say you hear a lot about people who say it's the end of the SAS because of vibe coding. Do you think there is anything you can do to protect Tali from that? And maybe that other people could do as well to have this moat?

SPEAKER_01 50:24

Yeah, I think one thing that I've also heard before is the pricing. If your pricing is low enough, um you will less easily be canceled because someone can really easily duplicate you with a with a clot skill. Um so I think I think that kind of plays in our favor. Um what we're also working on is just making the the tool um easily accessible by uh LLM. And it's MCP, for example, right? Um, so we're also building AI into the product. I think what's even more important is that through the MCP, you can just use Claud and can say, hey, build me a form, show me my last submissions, show me where I can improve the form, and also do it for me without leaving your your chat or without leaving, you know, whatever AI system that you use. And I'm assuming, you know, this will become even more important because people don't really visit your website anymore, right? They don't really, they might not even see the interface anymore because they'll build somewhere else. So I think that's something we we are um focused on is like how can we make that experience again as simple and as frictionless as possible, but then in the LLMs and not, you know, not in uh in Tally itself. That's what we're busy with um right now. Um and I think besides that, you know, it's true that everyone can build nowadays, um, but I don't think everyone can sell their product, and I think the brand becomes more important as well. You see a lot of people betting on, you know, in real life connections, doing events, doing meetups, but also having the founders stepping forward more and then doing founder led marketing. And those are things we happen to, we've done that since since day one, and you do see it becoming more important because the story, you know, is is what will make the product more unique than the product itself, because we see new competitors popping up um every day, which is also a downside of building in public. Um everyone is like, hey, I'm also gonna make a forum builder um and and replicate uh the success. Um, so yeah, I think those are things we're we're thinking of. How can we really make the product uh as flexible as possible and put it in the hands of the users and the agents and uh and so on, and make sure that it plays very well with the lovables and and the other tools uh out there. So yeah, we'll um but we'll need to uh talk again in a few years.

SPEAKER_00 53:13

Well, I think first you do that really well because I was using Tally with my open claw, and that was amazing because he was basically building the form without me even going on the website, sending the form with the link to other people. It was uh seamless. So I think you're doing a good job on that.

SPEAKER_01 53:33

Oh, that's cool to hear. Yeah, I have I didn't test the open claw yet, but um glad to hear that it's that it's working well.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

Well, as you said, we'll have another talk in a few years, but until now, thank you very much, Marie, for your time. And uh I wish you the best with study.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.