Maker of Habit

By Kyleigh from Maker of Habit

#020 - Marie Martens (@MarieMartens) - Turning a thousand DMs into $10k MRR

#20・ Feb 15, 2022

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Marie Martens (@MarieMartens) - Turning a thousand DMs into $10k MRR

WHY SHE’S FEATURED:

Quit her marketing job to be a digital nomad and build a business with her partner Filip in the summer of 2020
The two of them built Tally from ground up, which recently passed $10k MRR and 20,000 users
Tally won #4 Product of the Month on Product Hunt in March 2021
Went after big incumbents like Google Forms & Typeform
Builds for indiemakers and the no-code community
I’m a huge fan of the product!
She builds in public on Twitter and shares useful frameworks + learnings, like this write up about measuring their product-market fit.

Tally has experienced CRAZY growth in the past year. Let’s take a look through the timeline:

March 2021: Launched on Product Hunt

April 2021: 4,000 users, $1k MRR

October 2021: 11,000 users, $5k mRR

December 2021: 16,700 users, $8.5k MRR

February 2022: 20,000 users, $10k MRR

In that time, Tally has helped users create over 20,000 forms that have collected over a million responses 😱. So what is the secret to success behind this indiehacking duo? How did they go after big incumbents Google Forms + Typeform and see so much immediate success?

Well, it wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t easy. But they did a couple smart things that set up them up for success. For one, as opposed to some of us solomakers, Marie and Filip work together and seem to have a well functioning and complimentary business partnership–Filip focuses on development of the product and new features, and Marie focuses on marketing, product, and growth. That division of responsibilities meant that Marie had more time to build relationships with users. At one point, she said she was sending 100-200 DM’s a day asking for people to try it out and give feedback.

They’ve also formulated a great product-led growth strategy, as well as fostered a community of users around their product.

These are great strategies. But what about Marie’s habits? What was at work beneath the strategies, and behind all those DM'S👇

3 Habits that changed Marie’s trajectory:

📣 Building in public - We’ve been sharing our journey since we launched on Twitter, Indie Hackers and Reddit. These channels have been an incredible source of feedback, support and growth.

🌱 Keeping things simple - We ship new features regularly, but as we add more functionality we also want to keep the product accessible and easy-to-use. Creating forms with Tally should be fun and effortless, so whenever we add a new feature we try to prioritize the ease of use over everything else. Keeping the product’s focus narrow creates a natural limit to its complexity, and also reduces the amount of support overhead.

🤲 Providing personal support - Whether it’s replying to Slack messages, emails or DM’s, we are always talking to our users and often get praised for that. When people reach out, they often expect to get an automated answer. But when they realize there’s an actual person answering on a Sunday evening, and that person happens to be a co-founder, the conversation suddenly becomes personal and you get credit for that.

As a long-time user of Tally, I can tell you that Marie walks the walk. Every time I reach out on Twitter with feedback or question, I get an immediate response. I’m not sure how she sustains that, but its working!

Thanks for sharing with us, Marie. And congrats on $10K!

Follow Marie on Twitter here 👉 @MarieMartens to keep following this rocket ship 🚀

Build new habits + stick with them

Looking to build some new habits? Harold is a quirky text-messaging bot that helps you build new habits with one text message a day.

You can use Harold to build habits like Alina, for example:

Did you talk to a user today?
Did you DM 10 people asking for feedback?

You’ll be surprised what can happen with just 1 text message each day.

Need some help with #BuildingInPublic?

Check out my new product Promptly.so (launching soon!)

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Kyleigh from Maker of Habit @bagelsangranola

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