Episode 717 | Bootstrapping to $1.3M ARR and 300,000 Free Users

Rob Walling:
If you’re looking for Startups For the Rest of Us, you’re in the right place. I’m Rob Walling, and today I talk with Marie Martens about bootstrapping her form building SaaS to 1.3 million in ARR and 300,000 free users. It’s a great conversation, and what I love about what she and her partner have done is really go against the odds of launching something with a massive free plan, very generous, really low price point, and yet still being able to get to 1.3 million ARR in the span of just a few years. 

Marie is going to speak at MicroConf Europe in lovely Dubrovnik, Croatia. Tickets have just gone on sale, the event will sell out. It is being held October sixth through eighth at this amazing venue. It is literally one of the best, if not the best venue that we’ve ever had any MicroConf at. And I mean any MicroConf, a US, a Europe. Really gonna be an amazing event. So if you want to hear more from Marie, if you want to meet me in person and hang out with about 125 of your favorite bootstrapped founder friends, grab a ticket at microconf.com/europe. That’s microconf.com/europe.

Before we dive into the episode, I wanted to let you know that it’s your last chance to apply for MicroConf Masterminds. Applications close on June 12th at midnight. Finding the right founders to surround yourself with can feel like an impossibly hard task. Over the past few years, our team has successfully hand-matched over 1000 founders into mastermind groups by looking at your revenue, team size, strengths, goals, and a few other data points to make sure your peer group is the right fit. Once matched, you’ll also have access to our mentorship series, a three-month program where you can connect with some great minds in sales, business development, marketing, and more. 

If you’re looking for accountability, honest feedback about your business and the opportunity to make new friends that care about your success, you can learn more and apply today at microconfmasterminds.com. Applications are closing soon, so make sure to get your application in by June 12th. Again, that’s microconfmasterminds.com. It’s a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Let’s dive in. 

Marie, welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us.  

Marie Martens:
Thank you so much for having me.  

Rob Walling:
I’m excited to talk to you today about Tally and that’s at tally.so. Your H1 is the simplest way to create forms, say goodbye to boring forms, meet Tally, the free intuitive form builder you’ve been looking for.  

Marie Martens:
Correct.  

Rob Walling:
And you’re quite the success story with the Indie Hacker build in public crowd in the sense that you are one of, I’ll say, it’s a small number of folks who are trying to launch things and be a lifestyle bootstrapper, and you’re one of the small number that has really achieved some marked success with it. Can you give us an idea of where the business is today because you’ve been very public about numbers, I’ve heard you talk about in other presentations, but where do you stand?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, we now have around 300,000 users worldwide using Tally. Most of them are free. We have around 4,500 paying customers and that results in 1.3 million ARR today.  

Rob Walling:
That’s incredible. And that’s over the course of what, three years? Did you launch in 2021?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, so after summer it will be four years. Yep.  

Rob Walling:
Four years. Okay. So let’s back the clock up that gives people an idea of where you are. Oh, and how large is your team?  

Marie Martens:
So we’re actually like two and a half people. I would say. We don’t have any full-time employees yet. That will change soon though. So it’s basically me and Filip. Filip is my technical co-founder, but also my partner in life. And then, we have a freelancer helping us out part-time for customer support.  

Rob Walling:
You have 300,000 users and a part-time customer support person. That is incredible. Are you and Filip doing support as well?  

Marie Martens:
Not anymore. We do once in a while, but it’s definitely not our main task anymore, no.  

Rob Walling:
How is it possible with that many users that you don’t have ’cause my last SaaS Drip, we had 12 full-time customer support people by the time we had, I think, it was 30,000 or 40,000 free users. So obviously, different products. Drip is very complicated. It’s marketing automation, it’s a lot more expensive and all that. Is it that just the nature of Tally that it’s so easy to build a form and you just kind of know what you’re doing? How would that possibly not be a full-time job?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, I think the main ingredient there is that we really try to keep the product simple. So as you read on the website, simplest way to create forms, so the simpler, the easier for people to use. So there’s a heavy focus on that user experience. Besides that, we have invested a lot in documenting, in creating tutorials and making sure that it is self-service. It is worthwhile mentioning that now it’s one part-time person, but we are actually hiring two more people, but they will also work a couple of hours a day basically, but in different time zones so that we can reduce our response time because now it’s like max one day, but it is getting difficult. So that’s an important note there. But yeah, I think why, I think because of the product really, the product itself is pretty intuitive and people can find their own way through it. 

But definitely support has been an important factor in our journey. We can maybe talk about it a bit more later and has come with ups and downs. We have had to implement a lot of new measures to keep it manageable, but yeah, for now it’s one part-time person.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, and I think intuitive is one thing, but a lot of us build intuitive software. I get the feeling that it’s the nature of the product that if you’re going to build a form builder, you know you’re going to type some stuff out, you’re going to drag and drop something and then you’re going to post it, and that’s it. There’s not a ton of complexity on that. I think of it also like electronic signature, like Ruben Gomez, who comes on the show a lot, has SignWell, and there’s stuff to that product, but really it’s like you sign in, you upload a document and someone signs it or they don’t, that’s the extent of the process. It is just a simpler product than like a CRM or marketing automation. Yeah.  

Marie Martens:
Definitely there’s that and I think where it becomes complex is integrations because forms are usually the beginning of the workflow. So a lot of support is also about that. The moment it gets a bit more technical, you can inject custom CSS, stuff like that. It can get pretty advanced because people build crazy things with no code tools, but at the heart it’s just a form indeed, first name, last name, e-mail, so most people can make that work. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Okay, so let’s step back a little bit to let’s say 2021 or around the time you launched. There were already dozens, if not hundreds, of form builders. So what did you do in the early days? And I heard some rumblings about cold outreach that you were doing, which is crazy to me because A) if you have a free plan and B) you’re only paid plan, so folks now is $29 a month, cold outreach doesn’t work at that scale. You can’t make money on a product doing cold outreach at 29. So you were doing cold outreach for other reasons. What were you doing to get it kick-started and to get people to pay attention when there’s already a 150, 200, 300 form builders out there?  

Marie Martens:
So I think there’s two parts. So we’re bootstrapped and we’re a small team and from the beginning, we were very conscious about that. We wanted to keep it bootstrapped, we wanted to keep it small and lean. And so for us, it seemed easier to go in a very competitive market. You know there’s demand, but where we can just grab that small percentage of the market and if we can manage to do that, that’s already huge for us because we’re so small, we don’t have to earn as much as the big players. Of course, downside of that is that we don’t have the marketing budgets of the big ones. So we had to do something different. We didn’t have any network in the space. So we mainly launched in the beginning in no-code communities and on Indie Hackers. And to basically get the first users, we did cold outreach because that was the simplest way to do. 

We would go on Product Hunt. On Product Hunt, we would look at people that have uploaded similar products like ours or no-code tools, so not necessarily form builders. We would make lists of them, hundreds, thousands of them, in a Google sheet and find manually, at the time, their contact details and reach out to them. So that’s basically what I did, I think, for four or five months nonstop every day while Filip was building and improving the MVP. And by doing that, we found our way into some communities. One of them was No-Code France, which is pretty big in Europe and Belgium. The whole no-code movement was not really happening yet. They helped us a lot in the start, promoting us, sharing us in their community, and that’s how we found our first thousand users by simply DM’ing people.  

Rob Walling:
That’s crazy. Talk about doing things that don’t scale, right? Paul Graham talks about that. Again, I don’t know if you’re cool with I lump you into the Indie Hacker built in public space. Is that what happened?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Do you identify with that?  

Marie Martens:
Yes.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, so most Indie Hackers that I see want to post on Twitter and then build a huge following and then launch stuff to them, but not do the grind, the cold outreach. Were you a free tool? Were you cold outreaching to get people to come use a free tool or did you have recharging? So it was free?  

Marie Martens:
It was free.  

Rob Walling:
Wow.  

Marie Martens:
We just wanted to get people on board. We had our TallyPro, our subscription, our paid plan after a couple of months, but we didn’t have any in the beginning. And actually, one of our first users said, “Oh man, I really love this. Where can I pay?” And we didn’t have, you couldn’t pay it and then, that was for us a very early sign of, “Okay, we might be onto something.” He’s actually still, we then made this $5 a month and he’s still on this plan just to have them support us. I guess that’s the success formula of Tally is that we’ve given so much value for free and we’ve built a product that some people really love to use and so it becomes a no-brainer for them to pay for it once they can.  

Rob Walling:
Right. And I do want to call out here for listeners because a lot of people try free and I would say 9 out of 10 who try it, doesn’t work, maybe 95 out of a 100, it is a lot of lot.  

Marie Martens:
Yes.  

Rob Walling:
And Ruben Gomez has these four markers that I often quote, I actually put them in my book, “When freemium can work and if you don’t have all four of them, you probably shouldn’t try freemium.” One is that you have almost zero support and we’ve already covered that ’cause again, if you had to go free and you have 10,000 users and you need to support them, catastrophically expensive if you’re scaling up. The second is there’s no real incremental cost for new users, meaning a new user signs up.= let’s say I had an SMS app where I’m sending text messages, very, very expensive to send SMS, very expensive. AI, very expensive. There’s certain, even e-mail is not very expensive, but there’s a little cost to it. So really having zero, almost zero marginal cost, which it sounds like you do. 

The third is that folks can self-onboard and they can get very quick value from the product. So back to my earlier example, electronic signature has a free plan, SignWell does. If you’re going to have someone e-sign a doc, what do you do? You log in, you upload a doc, they sign. It’s very quick to value. With a form builder, I bet I could build a form in Tally in 5 or 10 minutes if I half-ass knew what I was doing and post.  

Marie Martens:
In less, and we don’t even require to sign up. So you can literally go to the website and do it.  

Rob Walling:
So super quick to value, so this makes sense, versus a CRM, marketing automation e-mail where you’re like building workflow, it’s a different type of tool. And the fourth one is some measure of virality and if you have a free plan with no virality, it’s usually, don’t do it, it’s not worth it. But you as a form builder, if I set up a Tally form and I share it with people, you have a logo I’m assuming, and some type of, you’re at Tally.so, right?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Got it, got it.  

Marie Martens:
So we have the virality baked in because forms are viral by nature, and that’s why we invest a lot in getting free users because they are the biggest growth engine of our product, basically  

Rob Walling:
That’s your engine and that’s what I want to call out to folks listening is it is the, I’ll say the Indie Hacker dream or the lifestyle bootstrappers dream to just never talk to any human and build a product that does 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 a month and so often, people get pulled to freemium because they’re like, “Oh, well Tally made it work, so I’m going to do free too.” But it’s like unless you have what Tally does, which is a very simple product, which is super elegant, which needs no support, all these things, you really shouldn’t try this. It just doesn’t work. And I see people trying it and failing. 

In fact, when I was, so I sold Drip, which was e-mail marketing automation provider, and the acquirers were venture funded, $38 million in venture. That’s how they could afford to buy us, and they introduced a free plan. I was still there at the time and I was like, “I don’t know if this is going to work, guys. I’m fine to do whatever you want. You’re running the company. I was running product at the time. If you want to do free, we’ll implement it, but I just don’t know.” And it kind of didn’t.  

Marie Martens:
It didn’t work.  

Rob Walling:
It really didn’t because it didn’t have… We had a little bit of virality, right? It was like, “Oh, an e-mail with this, powered by a Drip link.”  

Marie Martens:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
But the other stuff was not. There is no support, there is incremental costs ’cause we were sending hundreds of millions of e-mails a month. There was no self-onboarding and quick to value, it was just one out of four at most. So I want to call that out, like you’ve built an incredible business with this approach, but I don’t want everyone listening to think, “Oh, well, I’ll just do the same thing” because you really need, do you agree? I’m sitting here and kind of preaching at you, but yeah-  

Marie Martens:
I totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree. I think for us, one of the main reasons as well is that we made it free is because we had to do something else than the market at that time. Because we are so small and the type forms and job forms, they all have volume-based pricing, and that’s something that we didn’t want to do. So we have to make it free at the cost, of course, of having to support a lot of free users, but we have to do that to differentiate ourselves in the market. And Tally would not be where it is today without a free plan. We have grown organically. Until now, we haven’t invested anything in paid acquisition. So not making it free was not really an option for us.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. That was a marketing channel. Yeah, well, you can’t invest in paid acquisition at your lifetime value. It just wouldn’t work.  

Marie Martens:
No.  

Rob Walling:
29 bucks a month, even if everyone you acquired upgraded a $29-a-month plan, there are no ads anywhere on earth-  

Marie Martens:
Indeed.  

Rob Walling:
… That you can make that LTV work. So it makes sense that this is your growth engine is the free thing. Now, did you know this going in? All the stuff we just talked about where I was like, oh, free is actually quite hard and it only works 1 out of 10, one out of whatever, 5 out of a 100, did you know that going in and you were really strategic and surgical about it or did you get lucky where it was like, “We’re going to try free? Oh my gosh, it worked.”  

Marie Martens:
We were pretty strategic about it being free. I think we didn’t fully know the power of the virality and how the whole product-led growth system would work, but we knew that it had to be free and that we had to stick to this and that it also wouldn’t always be great. We would make less money, but we had to keep it free in order to grow. And that’s the framework in which we were operating and we were still sticking to that. It needs to be free and needs to be simple. That’s what makes it work for Tally. So we knew that, but we definitely couldn’t predict that it would grow in the way that it did. So it’s not like we knew everything when we started, definitely not. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
I’ve never heard of anyone doing cold outreach for a free tool with no paid plan. That’s crazy. But you were doing it, just you were trying to get the momentum, right?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, we were trying to get the word out there like we’ve built something new. It’s a bit different than at the time what was at the market. Also, we launched four years ago. I think the last two years, a lot of people have launched new form builders, but I feel like they were a bit less bootstrapped ones at the time, and we just wanted to get the word out there and find those first users. And we managed, I think we got around a 20% response rate to our cold outreach, which is pretty crazy. Of course, it was pretty targeted. We would really go to founders, people in design, people in no-code, people in product, like people that used Notion because we have a similar interface like them, so that definitely also helped us. And yeah, the cold outreach, it’s something that I would definitely actually recommend and I would do it again because we needed that first batch of thousand users to get the flywheel going and to start product led growth.  

Rob Walling:
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So I’m curious if you’ve heard the phrase shrinking a market. It’s where you come in. So Craigslist did this with classified ads, newspaper classified ads where they came in and they basically were like, “Hey, we’re free,” and newspaper classified ads just collapsed. And then frankly, the newspaper business kind of collapsed because that was their main source of revenue. You see it when Make competing against Zapier where they come in and they’re like, “We’re 80% of Zapier or whatever the functionality is, and we are way cheaper.” And you see this with folks going against Salesforce, where Zapier and Salesforce, they still have the brand names, but competitors coming under them and really underpricing them. And it feels like you did the same thing here with what Jotform and Typeform and Paperform and Formstack and SurveyMonkey and Wufoo and Xeroform, Microsoft forms, ServicePro and there are a lot of them out there, but they charge, especially as they get larger, they follow the pricing playbook. 

This is what we talk about at TinySeed. This is what I talk about in my book of like, “Hey, if people are getting million form requests per month, they should be paying you a load of money,” because they’re getting a ton of value and that the money they pay you should increase with the value. That’s like the playbook they run, and it’s the playbook I run, frankly. But you haven’t done that. You have a free plan and you have a $29-a-month plan, which honestly kills me. If I were to invest in you, I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, A) you need more tiers and B) you need to charge for it.” ‘Cause I know that you could, I know that you could. With 300,000 free users, you could be a $5 or $10-million business.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, we could.  

Rob Walling:
What is your thinking on that? Are you going to keep this pricing forever or is this something to get ;cause built an incredible brand already, an incredible momentum, and is there a time where you reap that, where you reap what you’ve sown and you do introduce higher price plans or the 29 becomes, even if the 29 becoming a $49 plan, we do the math on that, you almost double the size of the revenue of your business overnight? So tuck me through the thinking there.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, it’s a discussion we have. Obviously, we have, you’re not the first one saying that we are leaving a lot of money on the table. I think what has worked for us is keeping things free and simple and only having one pricing tier and the fact that it’s priced that low actually a large part of the success of Tally. Imagine we would introduce higher price plans, then we would also, one of our USPs would be gone and the cost of marketing would increase. So that’s how we look at it. We do feel like more enterprises or larger companies are starting to get interested in Tally and using us, and we’re not fully equipped for that. We don’t have the legal team, we don’t have the compliancy. All of that costs a lot of money as well. So we’re heavily focusing on startups, creators, the smaller businesses where a Jotform, Typeform, especially Typeform, they’re only raising their prices. So they’re moving away, they’re moving up market. We are doing the opposite. 

So I think for us, as long as we’re small and we remain a small team, it makes sense to not raise our prices. We have talked about introducing more of an enterprise plan, but that would come with more support as well, compliancy, all the things that I’ve mentioned before. And we’re not sure if that’s the road that we want to take as well with Tally, especially because we’re having a lot of fun doing what we’re doing now. So to be discussed, to be honest. it’s not something that we’re planning to change in the near future because we feel like we can grow a lot more with what we’re doing now, but maybe one day. But it’s not something that is on the table right now.  

Rob Walling:
And that’s the freedom you have as a bootstrapper is you can limit your growth, you don’t have to optimize everything. You can make that choice because the business, the pricing right now is, at least I would argue, it’s not optimal, but you’re making that choice to do that.  

Marie Martens:
Right.  

Rob Walling:
You don’t have to go all the way to enterprise. You mentioned enterprise a few times. When I look at your pricing, I think $29 a month, there could be-  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, enterprise is too far off.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, yeah, a 1000, 2000, whatever. But there’s a 49 or a 99 and a 149 and a 200 or whatever, that could then have tiers. I guess my question, so I understand your pricing is, if I were to sign up and I had 20 team members, 50 team members using Tally, and we were getting 10 million form submissions a month and we had a 1000 forms out there, would I pay you $29 a month?  

Marie Martens:
No, because we have a fair use policy. So basically when you sign up, you also need to agree to the policy and it basically says that when you exceed a normal usage, so when it causes really, when you would have millions of submissions a month, then we basically draft off a custom pricing based on the volume. So it can be very, very high usage or collecting a very large amount of file uploads, things that cost us a lot of money as well. Then you would be on a custom plan, and that can go from hundreds of euros to more depending on the volume.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. So you do have people, you do have businesses paying you hundreds of dollars?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Okay. That makes sense.  

Marie Martens:
It’s a smaller amount. It’s not really where we focus on as well-  

Rob Walling:
Sure.  

Marie Martens:
… But we do have some kind policy or fair use policy in place.  

Rob Walling:
So let’s say, I was paying you $29 a month, and is it when I go over 50,000 form submissions in a month?  

Marie Martens:
It’s something like that. And if it would need to be consistently, so if it would be like a 100,000 for six months, then we would need to adjust the pricing. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. Yeah, that’s where the money is, that’s where the money is.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
See, I think there’s a lot of money to be had with that. So 300,000 free users, 4,500 paying. So 1.5% of your free users have become paying customers?  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, it’s a bit more, but it’s like 1.5% to 2% or something like that. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Okay. I want folks to understand that ’cause again, we launched a free plan at Drip and I think we went to 30,000 or 40,000 free users over the course of while it existed. It doesn’t exist anymore, and I don’t remember if that was a year or 18 months. Getting to 300,000 free users, even just that, is insanely difficult. That is mad props to you for building that engine. And is that pure virality? Is it really once you got to fly with that is what you’ve banked on, you really haven’t done any other marketing?  

Marie Martens:
No. We’ve built in public, we’ve been active sharing that, but that really doesn’t compare to the impact of the virality of the form.  

Rob Walling:
So virality has been the key to growth to date, but that will take you so far. Typically, if you’re having the success that you’re having, you’re looking at other marketing approaches, A) so you can diversify, but B) so you can grow faster. What’s next on your list of marketing approaches to attack?  

Marie Martens:
So this year, we’re looking at two things actually. There’s influencer marketing and there’s SEO. SEO because we’ve, from the start, made some really simple comparison pages, just to try out what it would do. And we do have some that are pretty successful for us, like free Typeform alternative page, forms for Notion, some very specific ones that are getting us more traffic. So we are now investing in, okay, what should our strategy be? Which contents should we create to grow organic, organic search? And then, influencer marketing for me really matches with the positive word of mouth that we have been having by just really engaged, happy users sharing content anyway about Tally and just the idea of how can we amplify that and how can we make sure that there’s more content being made around Tally, especially YouTube is something that is almost unexplored for us, but that can be, I think, a really good acquisition channel, same like TikTok for example. So that’s something that we’re looking at at experimenting with this year. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
One thing that we dealt with a lot at Drip because we sent e-mail was we dealt with hackers and we dealt with spammers. It was awful. At your volume, you have to be dealing with spammers. Actually, I was checking you out on Twitter ’cause I wanted to get your Twitter handle and it looks like you’re currently-  

Marie Martens:
We’re in it.  

Rob Walling:
… Dealing, as we’re recording this, this will go live in a couple weeks, but you’re currently blocked on Verizon or whatever. And I’ve had all of this happen too. What is that burden like, how are you working around that and what is the experience like dealing with that constant influx.  

Marie Martens:
It’s the first time that it’s been as bad as this week. So we have abusers coming in all the time. We have to spend a lot of time on detecting phishing, abusive forms. People find all kinds of ways to abuse the product. So that’s definitely a downside of having the free product, but even then, people pay with stolen credit cards and still abuse the system. We have been improving abuse detection, like our systems a lot, but still it requires some manual moderation in the end, which is actually a quite time-intensive job. And since last week, indeed, we have been blocked by several ISPs around the world. We’re trying to figure out why because it’s very difficult to get in touch with them to know what the source is, especially if you’re not a customer. And it’s hard to be a customer with all the providers around the world. So we’re actively trying, asking our users for help. They are also contacting their providers to figure out what’s going on. 

So yeah, we somehow got flagged or blocked, which makes it impossible for people, some people in the States, people in the Emirates as well to access Tally and yeah, it’s the first time we’re experiencing it on this scale and it’s pretty scary because it’s something that we don’t fully control ourselves. It’s not like we can just introduce an easy fix and it’ll be solved. So yeah, we’re trying to reach out to everyone possible to make it go away or have it fixed as soon as possible. But I think it’s probably one of the most stressful weeks in the history of Tally that we’re in right now.  

Rob Walling:
I’m sorry to hear that and I know exactly what that feels like where it’s not in your control. Back in my day, I used to be like, this could be it. We could be done here. All of our IPs, sending IPs got blacklisted at one point ’cause of spammers. And I was like, if we can’t send e-mail, what are we doing? And it’s this crazy existential anxiety. So I am sure that’s going through your mind and-  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, I can relate.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Sorry to hear it. I think as a final question I want to ask, there’s tens of thousands of listeners to this podcast and I think someone listening might be thinking, can I take the learnings from Tally. And I’m going to say some of the learnings are start with free, be really low-cut, like just undercut price undercut, keep it simple, whatever, go into a different market to take it and apply. I want to apply this to compete with Intercom or Salesforce or Zapier or just any market that we could pick. What are your thoughts on when this would work and when it wouldn’t because I don’t think it’s going to work against Salesforce, for example, complex products, blah-blah-blah? Have you given any thought to how replicable your success is to a new entrepreneur or a new space?  

Marie Martens:
I think it is as long as you manage to build a product that people actually love to use, and I think word love is important in there because our early users are really the people that really value the interface that we created, for example. A lot of people don’t care how it looks, they just want something that works. But I feel like the small group of maybe even a niche of people that really values that user experience is what got us our first users and they were also the most heavy promoters and they have spread the word around. So if you can tap into that small crowd of early adopters to find first users and then afterwards you can scale, I think you can replicate it. 

I think you can build a very, very simple alternative to an intercom, why not? If it’s cheap, if it’s what people need in the beginning of their, for example, Indie Hacker career, I think it could work, but it needs to be, and I think that’s also a big, big part of our success is, it needs to be built very well and it needs to look good, it needs to be fun to use, and you need to have that virality somehow. So yeah, maybe with an intercom that would be more difficult, but I think the virality is probably the key ingredient. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
But I think you’re overlooking something, it’s market size.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Form builder, the market size, the number of, I don’t think if I build a cheap competitor, simple competitor to intercom, I wouldn’t get 300,000 free users.  

Marie Martens:
No.  

Rob Walling:
I might get 10,000 and so the numbers wouldn’t work. So that’s a factor I think that people would have to think about and should be careful.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah. Everyone needs a form at one point.  

Rob Walling:
Everyone. It’s a huge market and that is such an advantage that you have, so if you’re going to enter it-  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, definitely.  

Rob Walling:
… It’s got to have, like for you to have 300,000 free users, there are tens of millions of users worldwide, if not hundreds of millions. And how many, that’s a rhetorical question, but how many software markets have that many users? There’s probably electronic signature there. We can think of a few, but there aren’t. I don’t think there are hundreds of markets that are that big. I think there’s tens of markets, so that’s what someone would need. Again, I’m trying to say this to educate folks who are listening to be careful because you can’t just take lessons from your experience and be like, “Oh, I could just apply this anywhere.” It doesn’t work that way.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, market size is definitely, yeah, is definitely a big factor in it, for sure. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
But I mean your success speaks for itself and it’s super impressive-  

Marie Martens:
Thank you.  

Rob Walling:
… To have watched your journey. And when I looked back and I listened to a few interviews in prepping for this, there was an interview from whatever, a year or two ago, and it’s like we have 60,000 free users and then there was one where you said a 100,000 and I expected, when you got on today, that you were going to say some number that was slightly bigger than a 100, but to hear 300,000, I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going faster. The momentum is building.” So it’s really impressive and it’s been great having you on the show today.  

Marie Martens:
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.  

Rob Walling:
Folks who want to keep up with you, you are Marie Martens on Twitter, that’s M-A-R-T-E-N-S and of course, Tally.so if they want to check out an amazing form builder.  

Marie Martens:
Yeah, that’s where you can find us.  

Rob Walling:
Great. Thanks again for coming on, Marie.  

Marie Martens:
Thanks so much.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Marie for joining me on the show and thanks to you for listening this and every week. If you haven’t yet left a review or given this podcast a thumbs-up in whatever player you use or given a five stars, followed it on Spotify, I don’t even know how all that works, I’d really appreciate it. It helps others find the show and keeps me motivated to keep producing it. I’ll be back in your ears again next Tuesday. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 717.