Bootstrapping to $150K MRR by doing less, better.

In the summer of 2020, we launched Tally—the simplest way to create forms for free. Why? Because every business needs forms, yet form-building is boring and expensive.

We faced this problem ourselves. Google Forms is free and powerful, but its design feels off. Typeform is excellent, but becomes costly as you collect more submissions. We believe you shouldn't pay more just because your forms convert. So we introduced something new—a concept no one had tried before:

• We abandoned volume-based pricing, offering unlimited forms and responses for free
• We created a modern form-building experience—no drag-and-drop, just a beautifully simple interface that works like a text document

If this is your first time visiting our blog, here's a quick recap of our journey:

Sept. 2020	$0K	How we ended up building a no-code tool
Mar. 2021	$1K	From MVP to Product Hunt launch
Oct. 2021	$5K	Bootstrapping to $5K MRR and 11K users
Dec. 2021	$8K	Wrapping up 2021
Feb. 2022	$10K	Bootstrapping to $10K MRR and 20K users
Jun. 2022	$20K	Growing from $10K to $20k MRR
Oct. 2022	$30K	Bootstrapping our SaaS to $30K MRR
May 2023	$60K	Bootstrapping our SaaS to $60K MRR
Sept. 2023	$75K	Launching Tally 2.0
Feb. 2024	$100K	Bootstrapping to $100K MRR
Oct. 2024	$150K	Here we are 📍

So what happened since our last update?

Sticking to what works

We’re not chasing shiny new strategies; we’re focusing on what works for us: building a tool people genuinely love to use. It may sound simple—even boring—but simplicity, a generous free plan, and a personal touch are the core values that make Tally successful. When others move right, we move left.

Our vision is clear: we’re creating the simplest, most intuitive way to build forms. Instead of a “Swiss Army knife” full of features, Tally is a finely-tuned piece of software, focused on one thing and doing it exceptionally well. It’s pixel-perfect, polished, and built with the user’s experience at the center.

This milestone is the result of consistent focus on what matters:

• Sticking to our principles and staying patient
• Relying on gut feeling and building a product that feels right to use
• Growing organically by building a product people love to use (how we grow)
• Saying no to distractions and prioritizing improvements over new features

Our philosophy remains simple: less is more. We’re not here to flood the market with features; we’re here to make something people love, refining and perfecting as we go.

Exploring paid marketing

Tally has experienced impressive organic growth so far, driven primarily by our product-led strategy. Essentially, our product itself serves as the core engine for growth. We shared more details about this approach in a previous post. This year, however, we decided to branch out and experiment with paid marketing, particularly influencer partnerships.

We’ve noticed that creators have already been sharing content about Tally, so we wanted to test the impact of amplifying this content, starting with YouTube. While it’s still early in the process (10 live video’s), we’re encouraged by the results so far—let’s see where this take us!

Stepping away from discounts

We’ve always been committed to offering exceptional value for free, and our pricing strategy reflects that mission. As a small, independent, bootstrapped company, we rely solely on subscription fees from our users. This allows us to offer as much value for free as we like, without venture capital influence.

So since we launched, we offer unlimited forms, submissions, and 99% of our features entirely for free. This ensures everyone can create and customize smart, beautiful forms and surveys, regardless of budget. Not finding an affordable form-builder was actually one of the reasons why we founded Tally. In the spirit of keeping things simple, we provided one paid subscription tier, Tally Pro at the lowest price on the market.

We played around with discounts, with the main goal to attract new users. However, after a while we noticed that this audience led to increased support requests and refunds after the discount ended, which made it economically unfeasible given our generous free tier. That’s why we decided to step away from traditional discounts and promotional actions. Instead, we focus on building free features and competitively priced premium options.

Our goal is to remain the most affordable form builder out there, and we have no plans to raise the price of Tally Pro. However, as our user base grows and enterprise demand increases, we’ve launched Tally Business, which includes new features specifically designed to meet the needs of larger organizations. More on this later!

Moving into our first office!

When we first started building Tally, we imagined a fully remote, asynchronous team with the freedom to balance work, life and travel.

But then reality set in: running Tally demands all our energy, deep focus, and consumes every hour of the day. The dream of flexibility and travel didn’t last very long. Adding a year of pandemic lockdowns, two kids, and four years of working from home to the mix, work-life balance became almost impossible as the lines between work and personal life blurred completely.

Since our local team was just Filip and me, and we didn’t have the budget for an office at first, working from home was the default. But, in our home-based bubble, it became harder to stay productive, disconnect from work, and avoid burnout. Over time, it became clear we needed a change. Besides balancing work and life, bridging communication with our amazing remote freelancers, and building a team culture were all growing challenges.

Finally, we decided to find an office—and we discovered the perfect space at Ghent’s Wintercircus. Now, we’re excited to begin a new chapter with a healthier balance and stronger team connections.

Building our dream team

This brings us to our plan for growing the team. While we’ll always keep Tally lean and agile, the product has outgrown what we can handle as founders alone. Supporting a platform now used by over 400,000 users meant it was time to bring in experienced talent. We’ve been lucky to work with a talented pool of contractors (hi Jonathan, Jose, Jared, Anete, Mary & Carlos 👋), but with our dream office in place, we felt ready to hire an in-house team and build together in person.

That’s when Wouter, Full-Stack Engineer, and Frederik, Customer Support Manager, joined us. With Team Tally now four full-time members strong, we’re more ready than ever to take our next big steps forward.

We keep on building in public

This year, we had the pleasure of meeting many of you in person as we shared our journey in incredible places around the world. Since day one, we’ve been open about our progress (here’s the post we wrote when we reached $5K MRR after our first year). And even as Tally grows and competitors emerge, we believe it’s more important than ever to keep sharing our story, insights, and strategies with you.

In the end, ideas are easy to come by—the real power lies in execution, in putting in the hours and showing up every day. That’s what we’ve done so far, and that’s what we’ll continue to do.

See you in the next update 🫡