A letter to our future Marketing Manager
Sometimes a job can't be captured in bullet points. So here’s a letter, from me to our future marketing manager.
In 2020, Filip (my partner in life and co-founder) and I launched Tally. We started with nothing more than an idea and a blank page. No funding, no team, no playbook. Just the conviction that we could build the simplest way to create forms.
We bootstrapped from day one. That meant no safety nets and no big marketing budgets. Instead, it meant doing things differently:
- Launching without a website.
- Keeping feature requests manually in a spreadsheet.
- Spending nights sending personal DMs to potential users on Product Hunt.
- Joining Slack groups, Reddit threads, and forums just to ask for feedback.
- Building in public and sharing our highs and lows.
- Doing customer support ourselves for 3 years.
We MVP’ed everything, but we also cared deeply about craft. And somehow, that mix of scrappiness and attention to detail shaped what Tally is today.
A product loved by over a million teams around the world. We’re a tiny team of 4 full-time and 5 part-time remote folks. And we’ve gotten here mostly through word of mouth, community, and product love.
Marie Martens
At the heart of our growth lies a simple truth: our users are our biggest promoters. We built with them, from day one. That’s why our roadmap is shaped by their voices. That’s why our brand feels authentic, even though it started with a free illustration pack and no designers (we’re looking for one though).
Why I’m writing this letter
For years, I often said “we don’t do marketing”. But that’s not really true. We just did marketing our way.
Our early users became our biggest promoters. We talked and listened non stop. They told their friends, shared Tally on Twitter, and even helped shape our roadmap. Word of mouth became our growth engine.
We didn’t send spammy newsletters (in fact, sometimes we skip months entirely). We don’t have complex funnels. We don’t upsell or use dark patterns. We didn’t really run ads (though we tried).
What we did do was care about the details. A Product Hunt launch. A thoughtful social post. A podcast interview because it felt right. A community meetup where we got to talk to users face-to-face. A keynote because Nathan Latka asked. These things don’t scale, but they create stories. And stories fuel word of mouth.
So why are we hiring our first marketing manager now?
We’ve reached a point where Tally deserves a louder voice. We want to show more people what they can do with Tally, and we want to do it in a way that stays true to how we got here.
That means:
- Working alongside our product roadmap.
- Spotting highly requested features and interesting use cases.
- Turning them into content: educational videos, tweets, blogposts, help center guides, maybe even side projects.
It also means showing up in the small and surprising places, whether that’s a niche newsletter, a Twitter thread that sparks conversations, or a local meetup. It means telling the stories behind the product, the people who use it, and the way we build.
Who we’re looking for
You’re the first marketing hire, which means you’ll be responsible for everything, and executing everything. You’ll work closely together with me and with Emily, who runs social at Tally. You might have seen some of her meme creations, TikTok videos, or community spotlights.
We’re not looking for someone to run ads or pump out generic campaigns. We’re looking for someone who wants to become Tally’s biggest ambassador. Someone who loves mixing content, community, and creativity. Someone who’s just as comfortable recording a loom as they are jumping on Reddit to help a user or brainstorming a fun launch idea.
Maybe your professional career is still young, or maybe you have been a founder in the past. What matters most is that you’re not afraid to be a one-person team, one that MVP’s everything while still caring deeply about the details. You’ll thrive here if you like wearing many hats. If you don’t mind experimenting, shipping small, and learning fast. If you have strong opinions, but loosely held.
At Tally, you won’t inherit a marketing budget, a CRM full of automations or a giant playbook. You’ll help me write the playbook from scratch, with the same scrappiness, love for details, and focus on simplicity that got us here.
We’re still small. That means every launch, every post, every experiment you do will matter. Your fingerprints will be on Tally’s story as we grow.
We care deeply about product, brand, and community. And we’d love to work with someone who does too.
Anyway, lots of stuff we can talk over at a coffee. And just so you know: we work out of the Wintercircus in Ghent, and we’d love for you to join us in the office every day. Being close together helps us move fast, share ideas, and build the kind of craft and detail Tally is known for.
So if this sounds like your kind of adventure, one where the “marketing strategy” is not about making fancy keynotes, but often just building things people love and telling the world about it, I’d love to meet you.
See you soon, Marie
P.S. We offer a competitive salary package, an ESOP plan, and all the usual perks, plus the chance to work with a small, bootstrapped, and ambitious team in the heart of Ghent.