Marie Martens the co-founder of Tally, an easy way to create forms online. She left her stable marketing job to start Tally with her partner in crime Filip and became an indie hacker. Since then they've grown Tally to over 16,000 users almost $10k MRR as they work towards becoming default alive. Through a mix of manual prospecting, a successful product hunt launch and product-led growth, they’ve turned Tally into an exceptional indie success story.

-> Subscribe to my brand new podcast, No More Mondays, co-hosted with Dan Rowden here.

What we covered in this episode:

• The origin story of Tally
  • Indie Hackers episode
• A failed startup, Hotspot
• How COVID crushed their first startup
• How Tally got their first few users
• Doing things that don’t scale
• How I became Tally’s first paying customer
• Biggest source of sign ups for tally
• The benefits of product-led growth
• How to do an effective PH launch
• Going from 3,000 - 12,000 users without paid ads
• Why Marie quit her job to bootstrap
• Would she ever go back to a job
• What it’s like building your dream startup

Recommendations

• Book: Intercom on Marketing
• Podcast: Indie Hackers
• Indie Hacker: Davis Baer

Follow Marie

• Twitter

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

Sponsor - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.