https://medium.com/@sonuarticles74/bootstrap-success-tallys-175k-mrr-playbook-tips-f748ad649f0d
Learn how Tally grew to $175K MRR with zero ads or funding. Tactical playbook with freemium strategy, SEO tactics & community building.
Marie Martens and Filip Minev’s travel startup died a slow, expensive death in 2020. They could’ve gone back to safe corporate jobs, but something made them want to try again.
This time would be different though. They’d stay lean, solve a problem they actually understood, and grow without burning through investor cash or ad budgets.
The result became Tally, a no-code form builder that reached $175K monthly recurring revenue by February 2025, entirely bootstrapped with a team of just eight people. Here’s exactly how they did it.
Their first startup was a textbook example of how not to build a company. They spent 18 months and a bunch of investor money building something nobody wanted. Classic mistakes:
With Tally, Marie had a huge advantage: she was constantly creating surveys for user research and kept hitting those annoying response limits on every form tool she tried. She was genuinely pissed off at the existing options, which meant she actually understood what needed fixing.
Instead of spending months planning the perfect product, they threw together a basic version in a few weeks and shipped it.
Most form builders make their free plans basically unusable — tiny response limits, locked features, constant upgrade nagging. Tally went completely the other direction: