We crossed $2M ARR with a Bootstrapped Team of 5
Two million in ARR with a full-time team of five—it still feels surreal. It’s been a journey of relentless execution, tough prioritization, and a whole lot of learning. Here’s a look at what’s happening behind the scenes of Tally.
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 form builder |
| 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 |
| Nov. 2024 | $150K | Bootstrapping to $150K MRR |
| Feb. 2025 | $175K | Here we are 📍 |
So what happened since our last update?
The Product Team Is in Place
The foundation of any great product is a strong team, and we finally have ours locked in.
Engineering: Back at Full Speed
Finding and hiring the right people slowed us down a bit, but our three-person engineering team is now in place and moving fast. We’ve doubled down on our core philosophy: ship an MVP of every feature as soon as possible. Iteration beats perfection, and getting features into the hands of users quickly helps us refine what truly matters.
Support: A Well-Oiled Machine
We take support seriously, we always have. By talking to our users, we managed to reach this milestone. Happy users become our biggest ambassadors, and word of mouth fuels our product-led growth. This is why support is key. Our goal? A first response time of under 4 hours. With the right structure and tools in place, we’re making sure customers get the help they need—fast.
Learning More About Our ICP
After a couple of years in the game, we’ve gathered enough data to better understand who our ideal customers are. This means we can start tailoring everything—product development, onboarding, and marketing—to serve them better.
We introduced an onboarding survey last year to learn more about our users. But we also screened and categorized our loyal customers manually to define our ideal buyer persona, based on their company type, industry, and use cases.
Fixing the Papercuts
Growth isn’t just about shipping big features; it’s also about smoothing out the little friction points. We ran a satisfaction survey and asked how we can improve Tally. Based on those learnings, we are improving our form-building UX to make it even easier to build forms with Tally.
Shifting Focus to Conversion
Our biggest growth engine throughout the years has been our free product. This is why we had a relentless focus on offering free value. We haven’t shipped any new Pro features in the past two years, so now it was time to level up. With the engineering team in place, we’re rolling out the most highly requested Pro features.
I love how @TallyForms is turning into the most customizable form builder out there and how fast our tiny team is shipping 🏎️ 🎨 pic.twitter.com/5lfAtrGDyj
— Marie (@MarieMartens) February 20, 2025
We also launched the first search ads in the history of Tally, an experiment to reach more of the right users for us.
Activating Community-Led Growth
Word of mouth has always been one of our biggest growth levers, and we’re doubling down on it. We just launched our referral program—an exciting first step toward incentivizing and amplifying our amazing community.
Lots more to come on this front, which will be for the next Tally update 🫡.