What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
I'm here with Marie Margins, the founder of Tally, co-founder really.
Marie, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
So you are, I should say, not a brand new founder.
You've been at this for maybe a year and a half, two years, but I like to talk to people
like you who I find in the IndieHackers product directory, where you're posting all these
updates about how your progress is going, and you kind of just started recently to give
other people an idea of what it's like to be an IndieHacker today.
Because I typically interview people who have been running the companies for five years,
10 years, and they're already huge.
But you started your company kind of in the middle of the pandemic, not that long ago.
Right.
We were super new to this phase, actually.
Even IndieHackers was new to me.
I've been in marketing jobs before, but I really wasn't aware of this whole IndieHacker
world before we started Tally.
Just because Tally was being picked up in a lot of like no-code community, somehow we
also ended up being more active.
And that's also just, for me, it's just also a big source of inspiration and seeing how
other people are bootstrapping their businesses, because that was also a whole new world to
us.
Yeah.
Well, your story is inspiring to me.
Like, I was reading through some of your updates and looking at your stats.
You launched Tally, I believe, in October of last year.
One year ago.
A year ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At the height of the pandemic.
And you're not like a mature SaaS company, you haven't been doing this for a decade.
You're competing with a ton of a very crowded field of competing products who have already
sucked up most of the customers in the space who are making many millions or hundreds of
millions of dollars in revenue, and you're trying to carve out your niche.
And already a year later, you're making tens of thousands of dollars, you have, I think,
over 10,000 users of Tally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We actually just reached 10,000 users a couple of weeks ago.
So that was a big milestone to us.
But like you say, we're entering a super crowded market.
So a lot of people call us crazy.
And the market is super competitive, for sure.
But a lot of players have similar business models.
And we just wanted to do something else, and we also wanted to offer a different form-building
experience.
So that's kind of how we try to differentiate ourselves.
Right.
Plus, we're just a team of two.
So we don't need to become a multi-billion dollar company.
So that's also a big difference for us if we can claim a small piece of the market.
We can become very happy with that.
Yeah.
We have a very small team, two people, you're moving quickly, you're iterating quickly,
you're growing rapidly, you're carving out a niche, you're not afraid to take on big
incumbents because you don't necessarily need to make billions of dollars.
You're probably fine if you get to millions of dollars.
That would be great.
Did you ever anticipate that you could grow as fast as you have in this first year?
No.
I mean, to be honest, we had no idea what we were starting with.
We started building our MVP last summer, and so yeah, mainly Philip, because he's a technical
co-founder, built it in like two months, and it was a super, super basic version.
You could not even publish a form, you could just type and insert some blocks.
And I just spent my time on some market research and trying to build out a network and just
really cold outreach and just browsing through the internet and finding people who might
want to get feedback on our MVP.
We just saw that people really seemed to like the form building experience, even though
it was still very immature.
And that's why we thought, okay, there might be something here.
Because in the beginning, we thought just the form builder, it's really not going to
be enough.
We need to build something else.
We were thinking more about databases and something like Airtable.
But then we realized, yeah, building a form builder, it's already a huge challenge.
The first months, we didn't really grow very fast.
We also didn't have a paying plan yet, so people could not pay.
That only came in October, November.
Now we also had a baby somewhere in between those months.
So it's actually only beginning this year that we really started properly working on
it and growing the product.
And our goal was to be like grand profitable by the end of this year.
And we're probably not going to make that.
We think we'll come a bit short, but we're definitely happy with the progress that we're
making.
Yeah.
Explain to me briefly what Tali is.
I'm on your website right now.
It says, Tali is the simplest way to create forms.
What does that mean exactly?
Right.
So the idea basically is Tali is a blank page, so you can just start typing.
It has a bit of the same approach like Notion does.
You just start typing with shortcuts.
You can insert blocks.
This way, you can very easily create any type of form.
You can make a survey, a contact form, feedback form.
You can embed your forms on your website, and you can also connect them to other tools
with some built-in integrations.
You can do all of that for free, basically.
So we also have no limits on the number of forms you make or the number of responses
you collect, which is a big difference with our competitors.
And what does it mean to make a form?
Who's actually making these forms, and what are they using them for?
Right now, most of our users would be indie hackers, creators, startup founders, people
that want to sell products online.
Product people that want to collect feedback can be someone that is an office manager and
wants to plan a party, someone who runs a podcast or a newsletter, wants to collect
email addresses, anyone that wants to collect any type of data, basically.
Yeah.
That makes perfect sense.
I use forms in indie hackers, for example.
When you sign up for indie hackers, when I send you the intro email, the first thing
you do is you get a link to a survey, which is just a form, and I collect a bunch of information
to find out who's joining indie hackers, where they live, what are they interested in, etc.
So it's super useful to have software that helps you easily create forms.
Almost every business needs forms in some ways.
So yeah, there's definitely a huge market for forms.
Right.
So earlier, I was talking about some of these challenges that you've gone through.
This is a crowded market.
A lot of people have built form builders in the past.
And I frequently talk to indie hackers who face this challenge.
I just talked to my buddy AJ, who runs Card, a website builder.
And guess what?
Before him, people have built website builders in the past.
And so I want to dive into how you were able to carve out the snitch for yourself and build
a successful form builder in such a crowded market.
But maybe first, let's go back to your origin.
You and Philip, I believe, are from Belgium.
And I have no idea what the startup scene is like in Belgium.
Are the people around you growing up and your professional work, are they surprised to see
you starting a company like this?
Is this something that's commonly done?
Yeah.
No, it's not common.
I mean, so Philip is from Bulgaria, and I'm from Belgium, but we live in Belgium together.
But in both our countries, the startup scene is not really booming.
It's nothing compared to the States, for example.
We live in a small town or city called Ghent, and there is some startups.
There are some startups, but it's definitely not common to have a lot of people in your
friend group founding a company, let alone bootstrapping it.
So for my friends and family, it was definitely, I wouldn't say a shock, but Flemish people
are quite conservative and more cautious with these things.
So not having an income is definitely not a normal thing back here.
So yes, I mean, people are surprised.
People still don't get what we do.
So you said you live in Ghent.
Is that G-H-E-N-T?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's correct.
I'm looking it up right now.
It's a beautiful city.
It is.
It's built along the water, so it's almost just all these canals and boats and very historic
old buildings.
It's a really pretty city.
But I was born in Ruch, and it's also a really pretty historical city.
So I'm kind of used to it, I guess.
But yeah, you should definitely come and visit.
Yeah, it's really cool for me to see the different cities that people, and the hackers really,
are building companies in, because if you're not raising money and you're not part of the
startup scene, there's no real reason why you have to be in Silicon Valley.
No.
You don't have to be in San Francisco paying $6,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
You could be in a much more beautiful city in your home country, paying way less and
living in a very cool cultural place.
Yeah, we actually wanted to travel through Asia and have lower living costs, but that
was actually the big digital nomad dream.
We had that, and we wanted to leave, basically, just when COVID hit.
So we were on a plane, and we were in Bangkok for two weeks, but we had to return back home
just because of COVID.
So our idea was to travel and work on our first startup, but it never really happened.
So now we're kind of stuck here.
We're a small family now, and we need to take into account other things like daycare.
And so that's why we're here.
I think if it was not for that, we would have probably been in a bit more warmer, more tropical
environment.
Yeah.
So this is another risk, I think, of being an Eddie Hacker.
You're a small family.
You have a child, and for, I think, your first 10 years out of school, you basically worked
very stable tech jobs.
You were a marketing manager, you were a communications manager, you were a product manager, and then
you decided to be an Eddie Hacker, and you quit your job, which I imagine is a very dramatic
thing to do because you know you're not going to be making any money possibly any time soon.
What was that process like, the story of you quitting your job and what that felt like?
Quitting my job was, I mean, it was definitely a mental process that went before that.
I didn't decide it in one day, I think, because we had a startup ID that we were both very
excited about that kind of really motivated me.
And then next to that, there's also just because Philip has sold his previous startup, we kind
of had some financial backup to do this.
I guess that's also important to mention is we're not students, we're not just graduated
without any money, which makes the jump to becoming an Eddie Hacker a lot bigger.
We had the financial stability to say, okay, we're going to take, our idea was actually
to take one year and just see where the startup ID would go and what would the worst thing
be that could happen?
I mean, nobody thought about a pandemic, of course, but just with the ID in the back of
our heads that we can always just find a new job in tech somewhere.
Of course, like the most difficult thing for me was not having like a recurring salary
or paycheck every month, but when you make money as an employee, it's just normal.
You have your money coming in every month, but when you make your first sale and like
the salary is very cheap, so when we make like $29 a month with a new client, that feeling
is incredible.
It's way more exciting, isn't it?
It's so exciting.
You're like, you get like the stripe alert and you're really like looking at the screen
and thinking, oh my God, someone just paid for something we made and that feeling is
still the same after a year, so I don't think that will change.
So obviously, you didn't start making money right out of the gate.
It's sort of a windy path to get to where you are.
The first company that you started that ever appeared on my radar was Hotspot, and I think
you started this in like February of last year, like a month before the global pandemic
became a huge thing and everything started getting locked down, and this unfortunately
was a travel startup.
Tell me about the idea behind Hotspot and how it worked.
When we were traveling, we were in Mexico, Tulum, which is like the mecca of influencers.
Now, we were kind of like joking about all the influencers that we saw on the beach,
and at the time, there was also a lot of negative press about influencer marketing and people
just wanting to stay for free and get everything for free.
And somehow, we started brainstorming about like all the beautiful hotels as well, and
somehow we came up with the idea like what if we make a platform that just has all these
cool places around the world listed, and we connect them with travel influencers, and
they can both work together.
Travel influencers can basically travel for free instead of hotels, and the hotels get
free marketing, which it was free for influencers, and hotels would be the paying customers.
And we just reached our clients because we also had no experience in travel whatsoever,
so we just did a lot of cold outreach like mass emails to hotels, and that's how we got
our first clients.
But because of the pandemic, yeah, we lost a lot of our clients, and we just decided
to keep on working on the product for a bit because we hadn't invested a lot of time in
it before that, and we didn't just want to quit.
So Philips started like building features, and I was writing content, and we thought,
you know, when things get better, maybe by summer, because how long can this thing last?
Well, probably, you know, we'll be ready, and we'll launch again.
That's classic founder optimism right there.
Of course, by summer, yeah, we realized that we were kind of fucked.
So yeah, you know, we were also both working full time on this, no salary, half of our
year that we gave ourselves to start this thing was gone.
It didn't seem like things were going to get better in the foreseeable future.
That's super tough.
You have like that sort of runway set out for yourself, like, I'm going to take one
year to do this, and then half of the year goes by, and you're like, I'm basically ground
zero.
The thing I tried to not work, like, I've been in that position.
I know many other thousands of people have been in that position.
How do you not get demoralized when you realize like you spent so much time on something that's
probably not going to work?
Yeah, I mean, we did get demoralized.
But of course, yeah, this for me, it was also the first time doing this.
So you know, we still wanted to make something out of it.
But I think it was mainly Philip that said, you know, this pandemic, it's not going anywhere.
And if we just keep waiting for the travel industry to pick up again, we might wait for
another year.
And then what?
And then we organized this fundraiser for health workers in Belgium to give them a night for
free on a hotel.
And then we also needed a form again.
And we just started talking about these forms.
And yeah, just one day we thought, hi, there's not really a form builder that we really like.
But there's there's a thumb that, you know, they they're also expensive or they have like
these annoying payrolls that we don't like.
But if we do things differently, but then, of course, you know, as you say, like super
competitive markets.
So it took us some time to really convince ourselves of the idea.
And it's also not like we really did a lot of user research or anything.
We just right.
Yeah, kind of made the MVP and did it.
I think that most people when you're working on something and you see, I don't know, like,
I'm trying to use this form and it's so frustrating.
Not there, right?
Like I use a million products a day or a week where I'm like, this is very frustrating.
It couldn't be better.
But then I don't necessarily think I'm going to quit what I'm doing and then start, you
know, competitors and these other things.
I guess in your situation that was more obvious because what you're doing wasn't working that
well.
And the pandemic wasn't coming to an end and it didn't look good for your travel business.
Were you tossing around a bunch of other ideas at that time?
Well, we needed to do something else and we didn't have a lot of ideas.
So it's not like we had a long list of things.
Actually I don't really remember.
I think there was one podcast app that we also talked about, but never really, never
really felt that through.
So this was more of a, you know, it had some combinations of things we both liked because
I worked with a lot of forms and marketing automation tools and I was quite enthusiastic
about it.
And Philip, you know, we were both really heavy notion users as well and he also really
liked their interface and he wanted to create something similar.
So it, I just, I don't know, it just made us happy thinking about it and that's how
things started.
Yeah.
I like starting your ideas that way because it's, it's, it kind of starting from an emotional
center.
Like what am I interested in?
Who do I want to hang out with and talk to you?
Like what kind of tools do I want to build, et cetera?
And like that's not, you know, obviously the most thorough idea validation process, but
at the very least you're making sure that you're going to build something that you enjoy
working on.
You're checking those boxes and those are some of the most important boxes to check.
Definitely and also because hotspots, like, of course we enjoyed it, but we really like
traveling, but we're not really that fond of like the whole influencer marketing industry
and that's also something realized when we started working in it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that the probably most important question when you're starting any business and you're
trying to figure out if you're going to enjoy working on it is who are your customers going
to be?
Are these people that you're going to have fun talking to every day and negotiating with
and selling with and having jumping on calls with?
And if it like turns out to be like hotel owners and they're not super tech savvy and
like that's not really your people, you might not like that business very much.
No, indeed.
So, our first customers now we're a lot more like just like us, you know, people, businesses
and creatives and designers and indie hackers and it's just a very interesting space to
be in.
Right.
So, the other hesitation that people might have in your situation is, okay, maybe the
existing players aren't that good.
Maybe we don't have that many ideas, but like don't you need a new idea?
Don't you need to like build something that's never been built before, solve a problem that's
never been solved?
Most people I talked to who want to start a company have this idea in their head that
they can't join a market, they can't build a competitor to something that's already big.
Why didn't that fear stop you?
We didn't really have that fear that much.
I remember at the time we were also, we also joined the Y Combinator Startup School and
every like with a weekly call and every call we did, everyone kind of like need to give
feedback to each other.
Everyone said, but it's not new, like it's not a startup because it's not a new idea.
And I just became so frustrated because I mean, how do you still invent something new?
It's not that easy nowadays, like something that hasn't been made before.
So for us, it was more about how can we make it better or different and convince people
to choose for us in that way.
It's funny that there's so much, like there's such an addiction to new things in this idea.
This weird idea that like to have a startup, everything must be new.
And it's like, well, if you look even at the biggest VC funded startups of all time, like
people were building computers before Apple built computers, people like their research
engines before Google, their social networks before Facebook, like they were e-commerce
companies and bookstores before Amazon, like none of the biggest startups ever were like
the first people to do the thing that they did, almost none of them.
And so the idea that as an Andy Hacker, you need to solve some completely unsolved problem
is kind of, it's weird to me where that comes from.
I think it's almost like we equate startups with this idea of inventions, but a startup
and an invention are two completely different things.
Startup is a business.
It's meant to help people solve problems and invention is, you know, creating some new
thing in the world that may or may not work or helps anyone solve anything.
It might just be a patent that goes nowhere.
And so I think sometimes we get sucked into this idea of looking at startups as inventions
when that's not necessarily the case.
Actually coming up with the idea is not, you know, the end of the journey, you've got to
figure out what to do next and you've made it a long way since then.
Like we said earlier, you're making tens of thousands of dollars, you've got 10,000 customers.
What's the first step in that journey after you come up with the idea?
Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, the first step was building the MVP.
Like I said before, it was really basic and we just like really started really small and
shared with friends and family and just asking for some feedback.
And once we did that, so we like split it up in rounds, we made like groups of, okay,
we're going to ask these friends first because they're a bit more tech savvy and then we're
going to ask the friends that probably have no clue what a form is just to see like, would
they be able to use it?
So in that way we did do some like user testing.
And once we had that group and like, yeah, implemented their feedback and made some changes,
we started reaching out to, you know, companies we've worked at, some startups that we know.
And then just, I started making lists of people on product terms, on indie hackers that seemed
interesting that might be interested in giving us feedback on our product.
And I just started emailing, DMing them, this basically really cold outreach like, Hey,
I might even building this prop, we're building this new product that would love your feedback
if you have five minutes.
Of course, a lot of people didn't reply to that, but a lot of them also like did reply,
which also gave us some validation like, Oh wow, you know, this startup founder took the
time to open our message and try it out for a bit.
And if they did, a lot of people liked it, like they had a lot of feedback, but they
liked the ID and they liked how the form builder worked.
So we kept on doing that and we're still trying to do that a bit less than we did before.
And actually we should do it more because that's how everything started.
I love this idea of sort of tag teaming it where like Philip as a software engineer can
work on this project to try to get an MVP out the door.
But while he's doing that, it's not like nothing is happening, you're constantly talking to
people and asking them questions and trying to figure out if you're going in the right
direction.
Yeah.
And what makes it work for us is that like we're like 50, 50, 50% product and developing
features and 50% marketing, selling whatever needs to happen.
I guess that's a good balance.
You had a background in marketing.
Like I was mentioning earlier, you spent a lot of time working at tech companies, basically
fulfilling these roles.
I think most people who are starting these companies have no idea how to do marketing,
etc.
I'm curious like if your background helped you out and how someone can go from not knowing
anything to figuring out how to promote their startup and get those first users in the door.
I guess the biggest difference is that my job now is a lot more hands-on than it used
to be.
Like I managed a team in the previous company where I worked where now I do everything by
myself.
But I've always worked in quite small companies, definitely the last ones I worked in.
So that was really useful to be able to, okay, I need to write a newsletter, what tool do
I use?
How do I do this?
I need to make visuals to share on social media.
I can do that myself.
That's not a problem.
I need to make a landing page and web flow or work with Figma.
All these super practical things really helped me out because I can just do all of that myself
and I didn't really have to learn it anymore.
What was more new for me was like the community building part, like how do I get in touch
with people that want to use our product?
A bit more, yeah, just reaching out to people and asking for feedback, things I hadn't really
done before.
Are there any resources, books, or people or philosophies that you've followed or learned
a lot from to help you sort of grow Tally?
Who are you learning from?
Like everyone on Twitter and the hackers read it, I read a lot of things that I just see
online.
I think a few years ago, I read the Intercom on Marketing, how they started.
They have an ebook on that and I find that just a great resource that really explains
how they started from zero to where they are now.
A big part is about content marketing as well.
Yeah, Intercom on Marketing is good.
It's like a PDF, sort of their growth hacks and how they got to their first 30,000 customers
or whatever.
It's ironic that that book itself, in and of itself, is a marketing tactic for them
because to download that PDF, I think it's like 150 pages or something, it's like you
have to like put in your sort of email address and your name, et cetera, then they start
marketing Intercom to you as they help you with this.
Yeah, but it's a great way for them to do lead generation and it's so smart as well
because they describe it.
We are a startup, but we started making content for startups because they were also our target
audience.
Yeah.
I guess that's also what we are trying to do, like we're building in public, we're sharing
our bootstrap journey just because we like to do that as well and we like to learn from
other founders.
But at the same time, these other founders might also be potential tally users.
They have a quote in here from Simon Sinek where he says, people don't buy what you do,
they buy why you do it.
Their point in this book on marketing is that basically in the past, everybody used feature
based marketing.
They would say what your company does and then tell people why they need that.
But Intercom says that SaaS has changed that landscape and now that it's so competitive,
you can't differentiate yourself on product alone.
You need to reverse your marketing and tell people why your company exists and get them
to buy into your mission and then tell them how you're doing what you do and then tell
them what it is that you do.
I wonder how much you agree with that.
Is that useful feedback for a new indie hacker?
I think definitely, but I also would not take that too seriously because in the end, like
with Tally, we also use a lot of our product as a marketing.
Our new features are also content, are also marketing for us.
And that's not necessarily always about the why, why would you use Tally to save money,
to save time, to get more leads, all these things.
But for us as a small player to use that and to, we're obviously not Intercom, we cannot
start creating content about these big topics because all the other big players do that.
So you do need to kind of go a bit more concrete.
So I think it's definitely valuable for yourself to think about it and to know why people would
use your product.
And I don't always take it like that, black and white, definitely not in our landing page,
for example.
I think for a lot of productivity tools, whether it's a document editing tool like Notion or
Form Builder like Tally, the sort of feature updates are super juicy.
Every time Notion releases a little update and says, hey, we've got a new update, here's
our new features.
I read through the entire update to see what's possible with Notion because I'm so excited
about it.
Or I just started using this sort of VR product that lets you sort of collaborate with your
peers like this office setting called Horizon Workrooms.
I'm like, I'm so excited about it.
It's so cool.
And every time there's an update, like I want to read all the features are.
So it makes sense that like for Tally users who are already existing users, like they're
going to want to know when you release new features because they're already so familiar
with your software and so bought into your mission that it resonates with them.
But I wonder what it is that you do to reach people to basically grow to 10,000 users who
didn't know what Tally was before.
Who are these people who are willing to switch over from Google Forms or switch over from
Type Forms or who possibly weren't using anything and decided to start using Tally?
Yeah.
Well, our first users, you know, were basically called Outreach.
And then we launched on Product Hunt in March.
And that was just gave us a big, big boost and user growth, just gave us a lot of visibility.
And after that, it was really a combination of us, like creating more content and trying
to push our domain authority a bit and SEO wise to rank a bit higher, which is it's quite
difficult for us, I must admit, combined with just trying to answer as many questions on
every form that you can imagine about forms, especially on Twitter, you know, type form.
I don't know if you, you know, has recently changed their pricing.
So it became basically more expensive.
And a lot of people were not happy with that, which was, of course, a good, yeah, something
good for us, because on Twitter, like everyone started complaining about like, type form
became so expensive.
And the good thing was that we didn't even have to mention Tally, but a lot of our users
started like mentioning Tally as an alternative.
I mean, it's such a cliche, but talking to our users, which we really, you know, do every
day, growing our own little community on Slack.
Now, we, we have a couple of hundreds of users that are so engaged and that really help us
with like making courses, sharing Tally everywhere, making YouTube tutorials, because by ourselves,
we just don't have the means and the time to do so.
You know, everyone who fills in a form sees that the form was made with Tally.
So we have like a forward buy batch, which is a really important channel for us.
That's also the main reason why Tally is so free, because we can just reach a lot more
people in this way.
And I guess just what helped us a lot were the no-code communities.
Like for example, in France, there's a very big no-code community that kind of has embraced
us from the start and really promoted us.
And we have a lot of like French customers just because of that.
And because in the beginning, we didn't really know, like, we didn't really know what no-code
was.
We were not aware that we were building a no-code tool because it's a form builder.
Yeah.
There's so much here to talk about.
I want to talk about no-code and catching these big waves and how founders can take
advantage of these big opportunities like you have.
I want to talk about product driven growth.
A lot of the people that I've talked to recently have had products that kind of advertise themselves
and you have the same thing going on with Tally and your badge.
And so that's a really cool way to grow.
Maybe before those, like your timeline.
Because you launched, you said, on Product Hunt in March of this year, but you launched
like Tally, you kind of opened it up to users well, well before that.
It wasn't like you spend six months coding and then once you were done, you opened the
doors and your first users came from Product Hunt.
No.
You had many months in late 2020 of using the product and putting a price tag on it
and getting your first users in the door before you decided to launch on Product Hunt.
Yeah.
The main reason was because it's such a competitive market, we didn't want to launch our MVP on
Product Hunt because we know that a lot of feedback we would receive would be like, okay,
it's nice, but you don't have this feature yet and this feature yet.
So we did want to have a set of basic features that would put us at least somewhere close
to competitors before we launched on Product Hunt because we just didn't want to get all
the obvious feedback, like you just don't have enough features yet.
So that was an important one for us.
Also because we do know the value of a Product Hunt launch and it can get you a lot of visibility
and we also don't want to launch something every month on Product Hunt.
So we try to prepare it well and yeah, also, as I said before, actually we wanted to launch
on Product Hunt in December 2020, but our daughter was born three weeks early, unexpectedly.
So we had to delay it and also it's our first child and we thought, oh, we'll just do it
afterwards, but yeah, that was not really possible.
So somehow it became March.
So that's the biggest reason.
We wanted to have some users already just so they would support our launch and then
we just hugely underestimated having a baby and those two things made us launch only in
March.
Tell me about that because my best friend Len just had a baby in January and she's an
anti-hacker.
She had a very successful business before that and it's very passive.
So she's been able to like continue running her business and taking care of her baby and
it hasn't been super duper stressful as one might think.
I wonder what the experience has been like for you because Tali was brand new, like you
hadn't even launched on Product Hunt yet and you were doing all this stuff while you were
like six, seven, eight, nine months pregnant, presumably, and then you've done everything
since then with a brand new newborn that you and Philip have to take care of.
What's that been like?
I mean, it definitely was super stressful for us.
It was not that chill.
Being pregnant was fine because then we were also in lockdown.
So we had nothing else to do than being pregnant and working on the product.
Once she was born, we had a lot of difficulties with like, you know, we wanted to work on
it, but we also, of course, wanted to spend time with the baby and especially, you know,
for me as being the mother and, you know, breastfeeding and everything, I had to spend,
I mean, of course, I couldn't work in the same capacity as before.
But for Philip as well, I guess he planned like to go back to normal working days after
a couple of weeks, but then we thought, you know, we like, we're trying to create this
life where we have the freedom to do what we want.
And now we actually could also just enjoy this time that we have together.
So in the end, he also just spent more time with us, I guess, around three weeks before
he really started working again.
So we just decided to take that time.
And then we tried to, when she was a bit older, to work in shifts.
So someone would work in the morning, someone would work in the afternoon and then in the
evenings.
Yeah, we tried to like, make schedule, but that just didn't really work out.
And we just had to accept like, okay, we have a baby now, there's no way we can work the
same amount of hours like we used to.
And once we accepted that, it was fine.
But she, yeah, she stayed home for like, five months with in Belgium, usually kids go to
daycare after three months.
How do they fund like the daycares in Belgium?
Is this something you pay for out of pocket as a parent?
Yeah, there's two types.
There's like private ones.
So you just pay whatever they ask.
And then there's like government run ones, and then you just pay by your salary.
It's based on what you earn.
You pay like a fee per day.
And yeah, I think our dollar started going after five months, which was great for us
because it just gave us some kind of rhythm again, although it is like more like a nine
to five because yeah, you have to bring her and pick her up on time.
But at least it gave us like some some more focused time during the day.
Cool.
So now you and Phillip are with baby accepted that you can't work as many hours as you once
were and things are a little bit better once you've accepted that and stopped trying to
fight reality, and you've launched some product hunt, and things are going well.
And there's a few things that I think you had going for you that I mentioned earlier
that I want to dive into.
The first one is this concept of sort of product driven growth, where your product grows itself.
I love talking about this because it's something that you can think about early on as a founder,
when you're deciding what it is you want to build.
And it's kind of this gift that keeps on giving.
So the canonical example is something like a hallmark gift card.
Nobody buys a gift card and then just keeps it like you buy a gift card, you sign it right
and own in it and then you give it to somebody else.
And so it automatically advertises itself.
Or I was talking to John O'Noll who started Ghost, a blogging platform.
Nobody writes a blog just for themselves.
I mean, some people do, but the vast majority of people send their blog links to other people.
And so then once they do, it kind of advertises like, hey, this is built with Ghost.
And the same is true of form builders.
You create a form on tally.
You don't just fill in the form yourself.
You send the form to your colleagues and co workers or customers or employees or whoever
you want to fill out your survey.
And then they get to see this little batch that says this was built with tally, which
I think is such a good way to fuel growth.
Yeah, definitely.
And for us, because we're experimenting now as well, we first made this little batch,
but we had no idea like how should it look.
And we have one, we have actually like a bigger company using tally.
And we had a lot of respondents of a form clicking the batch and like not understanding
that we were the tool that the form was made with.
They thought they were applying for something on the form.
So a lot of like just not qualitative leads, but it just, just because this form had a
lot of traffic.
And now that we have a bit of bigger volume of users, we, we can AB test it, which is
quite interesting.
And now we're seeing there's like one very simple button that just said, you know, this
form is made with tally that is performing better than the others.
But that's, that's, it's cool to see just because our early users, let's say like product
company or startups, if they would use it, they're the people that would fill out those
forms would usually also be people that were interested in tally.
And then they would say like, Oh, this form looks kind of good.
You know, how did you, how did you make it?
And in that way, it kind of, it kind of sells itself.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about before I let you get out of here is this idea
that you've caught this wave with no code.
And there's a lot of talk, you know, like luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
And, you know, that timing is such an important part of business success.
And what's kind of cool about timing is it can be more forgiving than I think a lot of
people realize.
Like, for example, you said you're, you're so lucky to have built tally during this time
period.
Well, like no code has actually been a big up and coming thing for like two, maybe three
years now.
And so it is a window in time that you can miss, but it's a really, really big window
in time where at any point in time during those years, it's essentially a growing wave.
And if you start building for, you know, nine months ago, nine months after that, you're
going to be much bigger.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
I think for us, we just noticed that it was a big and growing space once we launched tally,
because so many people were just started talking about no code tools and no community started
inviting us.
But also when we launched on product hunt, we had like so many investors reaching out.
And I feel like a big part of that was because we were like in the no code category, right?
Yeah, they can see the waves to you in the trends of like, Oh, this is big.
And they see a path for you to get much bigger than you are right now.
And just like the sort of product driven growth thing, like this is something you can think
about as a founder early on, if you want to, you can easily sort of look out into the world
and be like, what's big, you know, what's, what's popping right now?
Like, what are people talking about?
Like, a lot of people were talking about notion, it's growing tremendously, you can go on Google
trends and see like, every month, more people were talking about notion, maybe I want to
build something that looks like notion or that plays on notion that integrates with
notion.
A lot of people are talking about no code.
A lot of people are talking about crypto and web 3.0, like, there are all these trends
at any given time, like at least five, 10, 20, 50 trends that you can sort of build on
top of and ask yourself, will sort of when to be at my back if I build in this space?
Or will I be fighting against growth?
So what's your advice for other indie hackers who are perhaps in the same position you were
in a year and a half ago, where you're not sure, they're not sure what ideas the best
one to work on.
They're not sure if the thing they're working on right now is going to work.
What would you say they could learn from your journey?
I think, you know, a quite boring one is just be patient as well, because a lot of the days,
you know, when you're not really growing, and there's no new payments coming in, you
can get the motivated really fast.
And in the end, we just need to find what works and do it again and over and over every
day.
And it's not always the most fun tasks and things to do, I guess life as a founder is
a lot less sexy than a lot of people would think it is.
But just, you know, if you if I look back, I had days where I just sent cold TMs to like
100 200 people per day.
And you know, it's not fun to do, and you don't see an immediate result, but you you
do need to do it to just get some traction.
But I would definitely say, you know, be patient.
I love it.
Be patient.
Don't be afraid to do some drudge work, especially in the early days when yeah, even if you're
making great strides, you might not necessarily see that on the numbers when you're first
getting started.
And don't be afraid to be pivot if things aren't working.
Marie Martins, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me with that was really nice talking to you.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with
Tally?
Definitely.
So yeah, we have our website, Tally.so.
You can follow us on Twitter, that's at Tally forums, or you can follow me as well as where
I share most of our of our journey and it's at Marie Martins on Twitter.
All right.
Thanks again.
Awesome.
Thank you very much.