Marie Martens: Getting an audience by cold outreach and other methods

Transcript of episode 26

Matthias:
Hello and good afternoon, everyone. Matthias on the microphone again. Today, my guest is Marie Martens, the co-founder of Tally from Ghent in Belgium. So, nice to see you, Marie.

Marie:
Thank you so much for having me, Matthias.

Matthias:
Awesome. I’m so glad to have fairly new entrepreneurs like you. You’re already running this for a year or so, as far as I have understood.

Marie:
Yeah, yeah. A bit more than a year now.

Matthias:
The reason why I like that is: you are not too far ahead of us, and you can still explain how everything works for you. I’ve talked to people who were 10 or more years in the business, and they don’t even remember how they got their first audience. So, this is good. This is really good.

So, first of all, to get a little bit into this, tell us a bit about yourself and your backstory. So, what do you typically do with Tally?

Starting out in Summer 2020

Marie:
Yeah. So, yeah, I’m Maria. We’re based in Belgium, at Ghent. And I’m the co-founder of Tally. So, we’ve built with a team of two, with Filip, who’s my partner and the technical brain behind Tally.

Tally is not the first startup that we founded together. We’ve done something else; something completely different before. Our first startup was called Hotspot. But because of Covid, we had to pivot and ended up building Tally, I think somewhere in the summer last year; summer 2020.

Matthias:
Summer last year, okay.

Marie:
And I have a background in marketing. So, I used to be marketing manager at several companies in Belgium. The last one was a digital products studio. And Filip, my partner, has a background in software engineering and has founded several startups before. So, for me, it was –

Matthias:
Wow, this is terrific.

Marie:
Yeah, for me, it was quite new; the whole startup world. But for him, it wasn’t. And yeah, we’re now, as I said, we launched the Tally brand a year ago. Yeah, we launched our MVP after summer and we now have around almost 15000 users. And I would say, in dollar, to be 7k MRR. So, that’s where we are now.

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s validation; 15k people who like your tool and 7k of revenue!

Marie:
Yeah, crazy.

Matthias:
That’s crazy. That’s amazing. And it’s a terrific combination; marketing and tech in two co-founders. That’s a really good situation, I think.

Marie:
Yeah, I think we’re fortunate to have that. So, we’re partners in life as well.

Matthias:
Oh, yeah.

Marie:
So, we just happen to have complementary skills. And I definitely think that’s a big plus for us because he spends all his time on designing and building the product. And I do marketing and everything else that needs to happen when you run a startup.

So, yeah, I don’t know how solo founders do it, but we definitely need both of our full days to make sure that Tally runs and to be able to do customer support and to grow the product.

Full-time with 2 people

Matthias:
Wow. So, you’re all in. It’s not a side project anymore, but it’s your main job, right?

Marie:
It’s our main job. Yeah, definitely.

Matthias:
I’m envious of your situation because I’m a solo founder. I have to do everything by myself and it’s my side business. I have a day job that sometimes takes away three days of the week or four, even. And that’s, oh yeah, I have to juggle a lot of balls.

Marie:
Yeah, I have a lot of respect for that because I don’t know where you get the energy and the time to combine everything.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
I think having a side project is very time-consuming and requires a lot of energy. But yeah, you’re doing a good job, I would say.

Matthias:
Nice. Thank you.

About Tally, tell us a bit about what does Tally do? What can people do with Tally? What is it?

Tally, the form builder

Marie:
Yeah. So, it’s a bit of a new type of form building tool. Most of you would probably know Google Forms or Type Form; the bigger players out there.

What makes Tally different? It’s a very simple way to create a form. So, we don’t have a drag-and-drop form builder, like most companies have, but it’s basically a blank page where you can just start typing, and you can use shortcuts and just insert input blocks and build your survey from scratch. It’s a bit like, if you would know, Notion.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
Similar user interface where you can just start typing and create your form like that. So, that’s one big difference.

Matthias:
So, I don’t need any skills with my mouse, right? No design skills required.

Marie:
No. Indeed. And actually, you don’t need your mouse as well. You can just use your keyboard.

Matthias:
Interesting.

Marie:
That works.

Matthias:
Okay.

Marie:
Yeah. So, it’s a very easy and intuitive way of building a form. And besides that, we also offer unlimited forms and responses for free, which is also a big difference, our differentiator, if you compare us with other form builders. So, we chose to keep it simple and make it mainly free, like ninety-nine percent of our features are free.

And besides that, we have Tally Pro, which is our paid subscription and that’s more aimed to –

Matthias:
Oh, you have a freemium model. Yeah.

Marie:
Right. Yeah, indeed. And Tally Pro is more aimed towards teams or more advanced form creators. So, it has features like custom domains, custom styles, team collaboration, unlimited file uploads, more features, pro features, I would say.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
But actually, the free version has everything to get you up and running and to create forms, to collect payments, to customize your form the way you like. Yeah.

Matthias:
Oh, that’s amazing. So, if I am a startup entrepreneur where money is scarce in the beginning, I can start with the free version and get my first few forms out there.

Marie:
Yeah, yeah. And you can get an unlimited amount of forms for free. So, that’s a bit of the difference with Tally. And it’s also one of the main reasons why we did it is because when we started Tally, we were bootstrappers, also didn’t have money for an expensive form building tool. So, we wanted to make it really accessible. And of course, we were a small team, so we need all the promotion that we can get. And making it mostly free also helps us with that.

Matthias:
Yeah, the entry level. The entry barriers is really low.

Marie:
It’s very low. Yeah.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
You don’t even need to create an account. You can just go to our website and create a form and try it out like that.

Matthias:
Uh-Huh. And for what purposes, just give me some examples of what would people do with those forms? What are they used for?

Marie:
Yeah. All kinds of things. I think if you would think of companies, that would mainly be collecting feedback from your users; for example, having a lead generation form or a contact form. That’s being used quite a lot. You can embed the forms on your website. So, any type of contact form is possible. Selling products: So, we have an integration with Stripe and you can add a payment form and basically sell any type of product that you would like.

Matthias:
Oh, interesting.

Marie:
So, that’s possible. Longer surveys or calculators where you, for example, create a tool to market your product. And you can use Talley to create actually personalized parts and make sure that if someone says, “Answer A”, they jump to another page. You can calculate scores or all kinds of things. So, for quizzes, for example, it’s also handy.

So, you can do a bit of everything; everything that requires a form and input fields, you can make with Tally.

Matthias:
Interesting. And there’s also no code required, right?

Marie:
Right.

Matthias:
I don’t have to program anything.

Marie:
No. So, everything is no code. Our Tally Pro subscription has some custom styling. So, that requires a bit of code. I’m planning on changing that soon. So, basically, no codes required. No coding skills required to set it all up. Yeah.

Matthias:
Interesting. And here in Europe, where everyone is crazy about GDPR, how do you handle personal data, for example, is that a problem or is it just “management”?

Marie:
Not really. Yeah, we just need to make sure that you manage everything right and follow the GDPR rules. Of course, we’re still small and our customers are still small as well. So, what we notice is that in the beginning, our users are mostly indie hackers and makers, people that are not really worried about these types of things.

As we grow, we now mostly work with startups. But when we get questions from bigger corporates, people that would require to sign like a DPA and stuff like that, that takes a lot more time from us as well. So, it’s something we’re working on now. And we’re not sure if we have the capacity to manage all of that and work with bigger corporates. Not as long as we are a small team.

But of course, all data is encrypted. It’s hosted in Europe. We make sure that we comply with all the rules.

Matthias:
All the rules. Yeah.

Marie:
But I guess when you grow bigger, of course, there’s just more administration and more legal requirements from companies. So, that’s something where we will have to grow in as well.

Matthias:
Yeah. So, at the moment, good privacy policy and good technical measures to protect everything, I think that’s sufficient for the moment. Yeah.

Marie:
Yeah, that’s sufficient, and that’s the basis. Of course, we are in the data business. So, security is very important. But yeah, as I said, we’re a small team, so we don’t have like a legal member of the data yet. So, that’s something that we’re all, I think, will need to be added in the future.

Getting the first users

Matthias:
Yeah. So, let’s get to the main topic of this podcast series, which is all about working with audiences. When entrepreneurs start out, they are very enthusiastic about product building, and they say, “Yeah, I want to help people with this or that product, or this service or that service.”

And I think everything “stands and falls”, as we say in German, comes with your audience: Do you have an audience? Do you have no audience? All these questions, and “how do I get my first audience”?

And I’m always interviewing people on this podcast, asking them the same question, “How did you meet your first kind of users or prospects or what was it? How did you get your little child into the public?

Marie:
Yeah. Good question. It’s one that we get asked often. We started really simple. So, our MVP was very basic. You could create a forum, but you could not save it or publish it yet. So, it was basically just an interface where you could type and experience the product a bit. And we actually started just with friends and family.

Matthias:
Oh yes.

Marie:
Like I said, very basic in the beginning. Of course, we have quite some friends that work in technology. So, we have some friend groups that could provide us with feedback.

Matthias:
Mm-hmm.

Cold outreach by DM and email

Marie:
After that, we actually started with cold outreach because we didn’t really have a network in the local space where we were new or in the startup scene. So, we went online and looked for people that could be interested in our product.

How did we do that specifically? When we just started out, I was checking Product Hunt a lot, looking for similar products like Tally or products in a no-code space. And I would see who would upload those products and who would give comments. And then I would basically look at those people, mainly on Twitter and send them a DM and say:

We’re building this new tool. And I saw your profile on Product Hunt. I thought you might be interested. Would you like to try it out and give us your feedback?

That’s basically how we started. And we did that in high volumes. Well, as high as one person can do. So, we did send, I think, hundreds to probably a thousand DMs to people.

Matthias:
Wow!

Marie:
So, I was just doing that all day, because in the beginning, Filip was working on building the product. So, that was my way of getting to know people, getting feedback, getting to know the space a bit.

Matthias:
Let me just interrupt you for a question: How did that scale? Did you spend day and night writing those DMs, or did you have a tool for that?

Marie:
It was not scalable at all! It just did not scale.

Matthias:
Okay. So, you did it by hand, basically.

Marie:
I did it by hand, manually. Yeah. Sometimes, I would just try to get lists of people who have uploaded products on Product Hunt – You can do that – and just drop it in Excel and just look for their contact details.

Matthias:
Their Twitter handle

Matthias:
Twitter handle or email address, if I could find it. And yeah, of course, the message was quite similar, and it was not like a unique message that we would send to everyone.

Yeah, and that’s how it went. So, very manual. Not scalable at all. But it did give us our first users! And I think through that we also ended up in some communities, like the No-code Friends community was a big one.

We talked to a couple of people who had just calls with us and were just really happy to give feedback and to say what they are looking for in a form builder, which was, of course great for us, a great feedback for us. Very valuable!

Matthias:
Yeah.

Building in public

Marie:
And I guess through doing that, we just kind of started growing our reach a little bit, getting our first users. And we did that for a couple of months. And at the same time, we also started documenting our journey and building in public.

Matthias:
Ah, interesting. Yeah. I’m also doing that. Yeah.

Marie:
Yeah. And it was mainly just writing about what was happening, if we had a small milestone or reached something new, or if we had a new product update, we would use all of that to just share on Twitter, on indiehackers.com as well, on Reddit. That’s really how we started. So, it was a mix of this in the first months.

Visiting channels that people use to look for a form builder

We were also just looking on, I think, mostly the same channels to people that are looking for a form builder or asking questions about form builders, and then we’ll make sure that we were there to say, “Hey, we’re building this new thing. If you want to try it out, just go to Tally and let us know what you think.” So, really like hustling, I would say, trying to reach as many people, talk to as many people, but in a very manual like, yeah, definitely not a scalable way like you.

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s totally okay. For the first time, it’s even better because you’ll get direct feedback. You can adjust on the way. You don’t send a million messages to people where you don’t know how they’ll react.

Marie:
Indeed.

Matthias:
So, it’s very good for learning in the beginning.

Marie:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it’s also difficult to scale that, because you don’t really know what you’re starting with. So, it would be difficult to – And also, just the time to automate these things and would probably, yeah, would’ve just taken a lot of time, and now we were just doing the groundwork and doing it in the manual way. Yeah.

Matthias:
Interesting. I especially like the bidirectional approach. You went out, called out, reaching to people and saying, “Would you be interested? Do you want to give us feedback?”

And also, the other way around, you looked for people who were already asking questions about form builders.

Marie:
Yes.

Matthias:
So, this is a bi-directional thing. Yeah, I like that.

Marie:
Yeah, definitely. Because those people are looking for something that you are building. So, they are definitely interested when you send it over to them. And of course, on Twitter, you have millions of conversations about every type of product.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
So, it’s quite easy to just plug your product in there. Of course, in the beginning, it’s difficult to get noticed, but I think you only need a few people to pick it up and start using it. And those eventually, also became our biggest promoters; the people that were there from the start.

Matthias:
Oh, wow.

Marie:
Yeah. So, that’s really nice to see. We have some users that were there from like Week Two or Three and are now in our Slack channel. And they’re just promoting us as well, which is a great way to grow as well.

Matthias:
Wow. And the people on Twitter, how did you find them? What was your search algorithm, so to say?

Finding people on Twitter

Marie:
The starting source was more Product Hunt, and then I would go on Twitter to just send them a message. But yeah, like you really go from sometimes you find a list of founders or bootstrappers or, I think, mainly startup founders or people that are interested in no code, for example. And then you have a list of, I would say, 30 people, and then it very easily spreads out to a lot more because they also follow people. Yeah, that’s how. We never had a problem with finding more people to reach out to.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
But based on, I would say, interests or whatever is in their bio on Twitter or lists that people were a part of, yeah, that was the main way to find them.

Matthias:
Hmm. Interesting. I’ve got so many questions in my head, I have to think about what to ask next. It’s amazing.

So, yeah, let me check this. You went to Product Hunt. On Product Hunt, there are people who make products. Okay. So, this is not pretty natural fit, I think.

Marie:
Yes.

Matthias:
There are many startup founders and entrepreneurs playing around there.

Marie:
Yeah.

Matthias:
So, then you reached out to them, let’s say 30. And you met more because they follow someone, someone follows them. So, you see their circle, right?

Marie:
Yeah. You start to see circles. And also, a lot of people follow the same people or follow the same type of products. So, it’s quite easy to just make a big spider web out of that.

What Marie does with the feedback

Matthias:
And what happened when feedback came in? Can you walk me through a scenario, through an example, when you got feedback and did something with it?

Marie:
It happens all the time.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
So, especially now, we get dozens of emails and questions on Slack per day, with just people that have a request; it can be anything. What we do is we made a public roadmap, which made it also a bit easier to share our progress. We also have a public changelog. So, every time that we launch something new, we document it on there. And on the roadmap, people can also see, “Okay, what’s next?”

And basically, we have an internal process, which is a simple Notion table for us right now where we just kind of keep score of all the requests that come in. And that helps us to prioritize and to decide what we will work on next.

But we answer everyone or we try to answer everybody that sends something to us. And then we just say like, “Okay.” Maybe it’s already possible, but the person didn’t find it in the tool. Maybe it’s something that we already plan to do. So, then we say that maybe it’s something new that we haven’t thought of, and then we just try to – We add it to our To-Do list and try to plan it somewhere in the future. So, we make sure that we always give that feedback.

And when we then eventually launch a new feature, we always go and check who asked for this. So, we can also just send them like a personal email or a Slack message and just say, “Hey, remember you ask for this? It might be a couple of months ago, but we finally released it” and they can try it out.

Matthias:
Oh, that’s interesting.

Marie:
That’s how the process works. Yeah.

Matthias:
You still know who asked for it. You have some kind of little note or is it linked back to them?

Using Tally itself to collect feedback

Marie:
Yeah, we have labels in our inbox, but also, a lot of the feedback comes through – We also use Tally, of course, to collect feedback. So, we have that in our product, on our blog post, in our help center. So, a lot of the requests coming through our forms. So, in our Tally dashboard, we see who has asked what. So, then it’s quite easy to just reach out to them again and to know who has requested which feature.

Matthias:
Yeah, this is good. This gives people confidence that it doesn’t get lost, what they ask for, right?

Marie:
Right.

Matthias:
Sometimes you ask a big company, for example, “Please do this or that”, and sometimes they ignore –

Marie:
You never get an answer.

And I think that’s the big thing, right? We want to give a really good customer support. And I think the people that use Tally also know that when they ask something, we will not always be able to do it immediately, but that we have heard their requests and that we’ve captured it and that we will also do something with it.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
Or if we don’t do anything with it, then we will also tell them that it’s just not something that fits into our roadmap in the near future, because that’s also possible, of course. But just the idea that there is two people behind the product. If you send an email to hello@tally.so, that it’s us reading it and replying. And I think that’s what a lot of people really value about our product.

Matthias:
Mm hmm. They value the small team, this commitment that you have and the care that you take. Yeah,

Marie:
Yeah. And of course, it becomes more difficult as you grow bigger because now we have almost 15000 users. So, it’s difficult to answer everyone on the same day.

Matthias:
Yes.

Marie:
So, that’s something we’re working on. But yeah, I think, it’s something that we will always try to do because it’s just the core of who we are and our products. And it’s one of our values and, I think, stronger points is that we always focus on the customer value.

Matthias:
Mm hmm.

When you think back to the early days, let’s say friends and family was the first circle, and then you went out and met your first people.

Marie:
Yeah.

The feedback that you get is mixed

Matthias:
Did you have conversations with them or was it just email back and forth? What was it in the beginning?

Marie:
It was a bit of everything. Some people just say like, “Hey, looks cool” and that’s all you get.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
A lot of times you don’t get a reply, of course. But some people were very, very engaged and really send us videos with reviews of the tool and what they would do differently.

Matthias:
Wow, okay.

Marie:
We had that quite a lot. But I think that’s also a bit in nature of, especially the no-code community, is that people are very helpful. And also, like bootstrappers, indie hackers. It’s a quite tight-knit community, I feel like, and people really take the time to help you out. So, that has helped us a lot. It was not that difficult to get feedback because we were getting a lot of feedback. And it’s sometimes hard to process everything and also to kind of stick to your plan as well, because you want to take in all the feedback that you get, but you also need to kind of have a vision of where are we going and which features fit, which maybe don’t. But the feedback has always been quite aligned, and it just really helps us to decide what we’re working on next.

Matthias:
Mm-hmm. And the dialog with those people, I’m very much interested in, too; the conversational situation that you had.

Marie:
Yeah.

What happens after a Twitter DM

Matthias:
When you reach out to them, it’s on Twitter. It’s a DM. And then what happened after the DM?

Marie:
Most of the time, it would just stay a DM; you would just go back and forward and talk in there. Sometimes, we would hop on a call, but it doesn’t happen that often, because then of course, you also kind of claim time in someone’s calendar.

Matthias:
Yes.

Marie:
So, it’s not something that we were pushing for. So, we would get most feedback through DMs or emails or on Slack, because we started our own Slack channel quite early.

Matthias:
Oh, okay.

Marie:
And the people that were really into the products and very engaged, they would join the Slack channel, and that was just a more direct way of talking or chatting.

Matthias:
Yes.

Marie:
Yeah. So, that’s easier to get like real-time feedback, I would say. But most of the time, the conversations would just happen online via email or Slack messages. Some were short, some were long. I would say a bit of everything. But most of the time, there’s just a big difference between people who think it’s cool, and they have maybe one or two suggestions, and then you have people that really, thoroughly test the product and they will have a lot of advice. And that’s great for us because they just do it because they like what you’re building, and they want to contribute. Yeah.

Matthias:
That’s also an interesting point for me. Recently, I had a young entrepreneur. She’s from America. She’s called Nesha Mutuku. She’s building a service for personal budgeting. So, you have an app on your phone, you’d say, “Oh, this is how much money I have and how much I want to spend, save or invest.”

Marie:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And then it’s interesting; you’d go out into Starbucks and this thing says to you, “Hey, you can spend $15 here, maximum” or you go to Gucci and it says, “Hey, you’re in a luxury store. Make sure that you don’t overspend”. Things like that, right?

She was talking about having contact to her audience in very informal conversations, like at a baby shower, for example, or at the coffee store or whatever it was.

Marie:
Yeah.

Matthias:
So, I was pretty amazed at that because I’m also this online guy who is talking online with DMs and emails and Slack and everything, and she was totally with one on one with people. That’s amazing.

Marie:
In the real world. Yeah.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
I think for us also, because we also launched during lockdown, we were just inside ourselves, all the time.

Matthias:
Okay.

Most conversations happen online

Marie:
But I think for a product like Tally, I think for us, it would be more difficult to reach those people in real life than with a different type of product. So, for us, it is mainly online that everything happens.

Marie:
Yeah. I think the nature of the product is also influencing the nature of the people who use it. For example, form lovers, so to say, they are online. They are building forms for the online world. So, they are online. Yeah.

Marie:
Yeah. Well, everyone can; almost every business, needs a form at one point. Like yesterday, I was in our pharmacy, and I know them quite well, and they were like, “Oh, what are you working on now?”

And then you also try to explain like, “Okay, you have a web shop in the pharmacy. And if you would want to have a contact form, or maybe you want to collect feedback, or you want to sell something, that’s like the tool you could use to do that.” And then, people understand, and they’re not from a digital background. But yeah, of course, for us, most of our interactions are happen online.

Matthias:
Mm-hmm. And afterwards, you said – Let me check, if I remember correctly. You said you got the feedback, you put it somewhere in Notion, for example, or today, in Tally, since Tally exists.

Marie:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And you go through this into a more kind of – you give it to building. For example, you build something for it, let’s say if people ask for features, and then you notify them back.

Marie:
Yeah, yeah. We just have a huge backlog of things that has been requested or ideas that we’ve had and we kind of just add votes to them. And when we need to decide what to work on next, we just check it again and then we - this combined with like our general feeling of what should we be working on or what has been requested the most, and then we decide to build that. And then we indeed also try to reach out back to the people that have requested the features, just to let them know that it’s available. Yeah.

Launching on Product Hunt

Matthias:
Hmm. And if a new entrepreneur would come to you and say, “Hey, I want to go out with Product X”, what would you recommend? What worked particularly well and what didn’t work so well? So, what? What should they do? What would you recommend?

Marie:
If it’s like about growing their audience, I would say for us, because we talked about how we got our first users, but I think what was most instrumental for us in gaining more visibility was our Product Hunt launch.

Matthias:
Ah, okay.

Marie:
And that’s something we only did after, I would say, four or even six months after we started sharing our MVP.

And we did that also on purpose because we wanted to have already a small user base before we launched, because those people could then also support us during the launch.

Matthias:
Yeah, right.

Marie:
Yeah. So, we deliberately waited a bit with launching on Product Hunt. And then when we did, I think it was in March. Yeah. I mean, it was a very exciting day, and we got a lot of upvotes, a lot of new users. I think we doubled our user base in one month. Of course, it was still quite small then. But yeah, that’s not something that happens every day.

So, for us Product Hunt, I think also for our type of tool, it was also mainly free no-code tool that it attracted a lot of people, and it gave us a lot of visibility. And I think until now, it’s still one of our bigger lead sources. There’s people that come from Product Hunt and that are looking for a form building tool.

So, that’s one that I would if you’re in a similar space, I would definitely recommend to do. But also, just to prepare well and to make sure that you already have some users that can back you up and support you that day, that you have a good messaging and story to tell when you launch. And so, that definitely helped us a lot.

Viral effects with Freemium to grow the audience

Marie:
Besides that, Tally is mainly free. So, all the free users, they have a Powered by Tally badge on their form.

Matthias:
Oh, I see. Okay.

Marie:
And of course, the more people use Tally, the more forms that are being created, all those forms are being sent to respondents or people that fill them out, so all those people see our brand as well when they submit a Tally form.

Matthias:
Oh, wow.

Marie:
And that has definitely been one of the biggest pushes in our growth now because, of course, our user base is growing. More and more people are distributing Tally forms and helping us actually to reach new people. So, that’s definitely a very important one for us.

Matthias:
And what makes people pay at the end? When do people switch from the free plan to the paid plan? What makes them do that?

Marie:
Also, a combination of things. The team collaboration is a big one because you can invite colleagues and work together on forms. Basically, if you work in a team or in a company, that’s something you would need. So, that’s a big trigger.

And then I would say we have custom domains. So, you can use your own domain name to host your form.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
That’s also a quite popular feature, just because it also looks more professional. And it’s also a feature that gives us a bit of a more long-lasting relationship with our customers because it’s not something that you change every day.

Matthias:
Yeah, that’s right. Improves the stickiness of the product. Yeah.

Marie:
Right.

And then I think, on the third place, it would be the removing of our branding. So, if you are a paid customer, you don’t see Tally on your form, and you can fully customize it, which is of course, important if you work for a company or if you just want it to really fit your brand and not have anything else on it.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
So, I think those are some of the triggers that make people pay for the product.

Be patient, keep going, enjoy the roller coaster experience

Matthias:
Interesting. It’s always amazing when I get to this point in the podcast with everyone I talked to, I think, “Hey, this looks easy. This looks so simple and logical and one step after the other.”

Marie:
Yeah.

Matthias:
And I really know that it isn’t, or it wasn’t. And in hindsight, everything looks so connected. And yes, of course, it had to happen. Yeah. But it’s not like that, right?

Marie:
No, not at all. And I have the same feelings. Sometimes when I do tell the story, I’m like, “Oh, it sounds so logical.” But while you’re doing it, it’s not! Not everything is that calculated.

Matthias:
Yeah.

Marie:
Like when we started looking for doing cold outreach to people on Product Hunt, I was also thinking like, “What am I doing? This hasn’t scaled. No one will reply”, but it’s one step at a time.

And there’s also, of course, a lot of weeks where things go wrong. You don’t grow. You feel like everything you’re doing doesn’t really have an impact. But then there’s other weeks where everything seems to, you know, the puzzle seems to fit and clicks.

Matthias:
Yeah, it just clicks

Marie:
And then you’re motivated again. And we have new users coming in or new people who pay for your product, and then you get enough energy again for the next maybe worse stretch. So, it is it’s definitely a roller coaster!

Matthias:
Yeah. Entrepreneurship is an up-and-down thing. Yeah.

Marie:
Yeah.

I think for us, what helps is just, you need to have some patience, but in order to have patience, you also need to be able to give yourself the time to work on the product. And for a lot of startups, that’s also connected to money, of course, you need to…

Matthias:
You need to have runway. Yeah.

Marie:
You need to have runway. So, I think that’s quite important. You know, we’re not like young graduates. We’re in our early 30s. We have worked like, let’s say, 10 years before we did it and had saved up some money as well, so we could give ourselves the time to do this, which helped.

Matthias:
That’s important. Yeah, that’s important.

Marie:
And I do think that’s important.

And then also, there’s just a lot of boring manual jobs that just need to happen every day.

Matthias:
Yeah, of course.

Marie:
And you just need to be patient, then repeat them and keep on doing them. And then I do believe that things will work out in the end, but it definitely takes time.

Matthias:
Awesome.

Marie:
Yeah.

Matthias:
Awesome. You look like someone who has that patience, and you even seem to enjoy working on your journey, right?

Marie:
Yeah.

You know, definitely. I think, now we’re still a very young company, but we feel like things are moving in the right direction. And I think the moment that people started paying for our product, even though, compared to other players, we are still very small, it just gives you that validation and the energy to continue!

Matthias:
And the confidence.

Marie:
And the confidence as well.

Marie:
Yeah.

Marie:
But we’ve been doing it now a bit more than a year. So, if you would have talked to me like a year ago, it would have been a very different story. So, I hope this will grow every year and that will give us more confidence and energy to get the people working on the product.

What will be, one year from now?

Matthias:
Amazing. What do you think? In one year or so, what will have happened in the meantime? What will it look like one year from now?

Marie:
Our goal is to become Ramen profitable and to be able to pay for our bills and our family. So, we have one little daughter, so we’re a family of three.

Matthias:
Amazing.

Marie:
So, if we could do that, if we could just live from doing what we love, actually, that would already be great. So, that’s I think, our first like next big milestone.

And we hope to achieve that somewhere next year. So, I think that will be a very important one for us.

And then for me, it’s really difficult to look ahead for multiple years because we don’t have a clue of what’s going to happen. We know what we want to do, and we know we want to build a simple and powerful form builder.

We want to grow like we’re doing now, and we want to stay bootstrapped as well. So, we’re not planning on raising money. So, we know things will go a little bit more slowly, but if we can manage to get to our next milestone, having the freedom to work where and when we want, that’s the big dream for now. Yeah.

Matthias:
Interesting. Thank you so much, Marie, for coming.

Marie:
You’re welcome.

Matthias:
And it was such a great conversation with you. Thank you so much.

Marie:
It was really nice talking to you as well.

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Outro

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