You don't need a huge team or VC funding to build a successful startup.
You don't even need a ground breaking idea.
You just need to build a painkiller product
Tally is a bootstrapped startup with 140K users and a small team of 4. (2 co-founders + 2 employees)
Their value proposition?
Google forms is too ugly, Typeform is too expensive 🤷♂️
Really..
The project was started because Marie and Filip (the founders) wanted to scratch their own itch of having a beautiful, easy to use, reasonably priced form builder.
What led to Tally’s growth?
Cold outreach in the initial days
Building a community of users right from the early days.
Riding the NoCode wave in the early days. They got a lot of love from NoCode communities in Europe.
Product Hunt Launch early on + Building in Public.
Typeform moving upmarket and raising prices.
Typeform raising prices meant small and medium businesses just couldn’t afford it. A gap was created in the market, which Tally filled up nicely.
Tally works on the freemium model - which means most of it’s features are free. But when you’re on the free plan, and you create a form with tally, you cannot set a custom domain or remove the Tally logo.
So when you share your form with someone, Tally gets free marketing.
Freemium is a tough model to crack, because you may end up attracting too many freeloaders and not enough premium users. It’s very risky.
But if your product has inherent shareability - like the mere act of using it will lead to it spreading to more people, then you can give it a shot.
I was a big fan of running multiple projects in parallel.
But I realize that if 1 of your projects is doing better than others, then you'll be stupid to NOT double down on it.
As my SaaS product (Elephas) is gaining traction, and doing better now (way better than any of my other projects), it needs more time and focus.
I'd be a fool if I don't give it that. I’ve had to make a few tough decisions because of this.
I wrote a short reflective post on Twitter about this. Do take a look -
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Eternally Curious. Writing, Learning, Building in Public. Writing about Ideas + Inspiration + Insights for creators, solopreneurs and indie hackers | Simple tips and frameworks to help you build a sustainable solo business
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