#229 – Stealing Users Away From Incumbents Like Google with Marie Martens of Tally
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What's up, everybody? This is courtland from any hacker's 点 com and you're listening to the indie hackers 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 andy hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities and the strategies they're taking adventures of so the rest of us can do the same.

I'm here with mary margins, the founder of ti cofounder. Really welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

So you are I should say that like not a brand new founder even at this may be a year and a half two years but i'd like to talk to people like you who I find them in the actual Victory. We are posting all these updates by how you progress is going. And you kind of just started recently to give other people an idea of what it's like to be an ny hacker today, know typically another people who running their companies for five years, ten, and there are already huge. But you started your company kind of in the middle of the pandemic, not that long ago.

right over super new to the space actually, uh, even at the hackers was new to me. I've been in marketing jobs before, but I was I really wasn't aware of like this whole in the hacker world before before we started tally. And just because Sally was being picked up in a lot of like no code community, somehow we also um ended up um being more active and that's also just for me and just so big or of inspiration and seeing how other people are are boot strutting their businesses because that was also a whole new world to us.

Yeah well, your stories inspiring to me. I was reading through some of your updates and looking your cats. You launched ed totally, I believe, and like october of one year ago, a year ago, the height of the pandemic and like this is not not like a mature SaaS company.

You know, you have 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 call about your niche. And already a year later, you're making tens of thousands of dollars. You have, I think, over ten thousand users of ti.

Yeah yeah. We actually just reach ten thousand users a couple of weeks ago. So that was a big milestone to us. But like you say, we we're entering a super crowd of markets.

And 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 kind of how we tried to differentiate ourselves, right, plus were just a team of two. So we don't need to become a milty billion dollar conflict.

So that's also a big difference for us. If we can like claim A A small piece of the market, we can become very happy with that. Yeah, so are a very small team.

Two people. You're moving quickly. You're editing quickly. You're growing rapidly. You're carvin ing at a niece. You're not afraid to take on big in combes because you don't necessary need to make billions of dollars. You're probably find something to billions .

of dollars that would be great.

Did you ever anticipate that you could grow as fast as you have in this first year?

No, we mean to be onest. We had no idea what we were starting with. We started building our MVP last summer.

And so I may be fillip because he is a technical cofounder, build 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 at my time on some you market research and trying to build out a network and and just really called out reach and just browsing through the internet and finding people who might want to give feedback on our MVP. We just saw that people really seem to like the the form building experience, even though I was still very immature. And that's why we thought, okay, there might be something here because in the beginning we thought just a form builder, it's really not gonna be enough.

We need to build something else. We were thinking more about databases, something like air table. But then we realized yet, like building a foreigner is already a huge chAllenge.

And the first months, we yeah we didn't really grow very fast. We also didn't have a paying plan yet so people could not pay. Um that only came in october, november.

Now we also had a baby somewhere in between those ones. So it's actually only beginning this year that we really started like properly working on this and growing the product. And our goal was to be like i'm profitable by the end of this year, and we're probably not gonna make that. You think we will, you know, come a bit short, but we're definitely happy with the progress that we're making up.

So explained to me briefly what talent is am on your website right now. He says today is the simplest way to create forms.

So dad, basically study is a blank page as so you can just start typing has a bit of the same approach like notion does you just start typing with shortcuts? You can insert blocks um this way you can very easily create any type of form, can make a survey, a contact form, feedback form. You can embeds your forms on your website and you can also connect them to other tools with some built in integrations. You can knew all of that for free, basically. So we also have like no limits on the number of forms you may CD the number of responses, uh, you collect, which is a big difference with with our competitors.

And what does that mean to make a form like who's actually making these forms and what are they using them for?

hot. Right now, most, most of our users would be the hackers. Creators, start of 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 um someone who runs a broadcaster newsletter wants to collect email addresses. Anyone that wants to yeah collect any type of of of data basically .

yeah perfect sense. I use forms and hackers. For example, when you sign up for hackers, when I do the entry email, the first thing you do is to a survey, which is just a form.

And I like a bunch of information to find out who's join the end hackers, where do they live? What are they interested in at that? A so it's very useful to have software that helps you easily create forms.

Almost every business needs forms in some ways. So there's definitely a huge market performs, right?

So earlier, I was talking about some of these chAllenges that you've gone through. I think this is a crowded market. A lot of people built foreign ders in the past.

And I frequently taught andy hackers who who faced this chAllenge, just talk to my body, A J who runs card, a website builder. And guess what him? People built website builders in the past.

And so I want to dive in to how you are able to carve out this is for yourself, and build a successful forever buildings, such a crowded market. But maybe first lets go back like your origin. You and Philip, I believe, are from belgium, and I have no idea what the start of scene is like in belgium. Are the people around you, you know growing up or and your professional work, they surprised to see you starting a company like this?

This is something that's commonly done. Yeah no, it's not common. I mean um so Philippus from bulgaria and i'm from belgium, but we live in belgium together. But in both our countries the start of scene is not really booming. That is nothing compared to to the states.

For example, we live in a small town or city code gant, and there is some startups, there are some startups, but it's definitely not common to have like a lot of people in your friend group, you know founding a company, let alone like boots in IT. So for like my friends and family, I was definitely, I wouldn't say a shock, but fluish people are quite conservative and more cautious with these things. So like not having an income is definitely not like a Normal back here. So yes, I mean, people are surprised. People still don't get what we do.

So you started live again to that. G H E N T.

yeah.

yeah that's correct. I'm looking at all right now a beautiful city. It's like built along the water. So it's some of just all these canals and boats in these very historic old buildings.

It's a really pretty city um but I was born in route and it's also like a really pretty historical city so I kindly use to IT I guess but yeah, you should definitely come and visit.

Yes, it's really cool for me to I see the different cities that people and the actors really are building companies in because like if you're not raising money and you're not part of the start of seen, like there's no real reason why you have to be. And if you have to be in to go paying six thousand dollars a month for a two beat apartment, you can be in a much more beautiful city, you know, in your home country, paying way less and living in, uh, a very cool cultural place.

Yeah we we actually wanted to like we wanted to travel through the asia and have like lower living costs. But that was actually, you know, like the big did is no much dream. We had that and we wanted to to leave basically just when when covode ate.

So we we we were on the plane and we were in one kock for like bangkok for two weeks, but we had to return back home just because i've cove IT. So our idea was to travel and work on our first start of, but IT never really happens. So now what kind of stuck here for a small family now? And we need to take into account other things like daycare. And so that's why very here, I think if IT was not for that, we would have probably been in IT and a bit more in a warmer and more tropical environment yet.

So this is another risk, I think, of being an any hacer small family. You have a child and for I think you're first ten years out of school, like you basically worked very stable tech chops, your marketing manager, your communications manager, your product manager, and then you decided to be an any hacker and you quit your job, which I mentioned, is a very dramatic thing to do because you know you're not going if we're making any money, possibly any time soon, what was that that progress? Like, I mean, the story of if 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. Like I didn't decided in one day. I think because we had a start of I D, that we were both very excited about that kind of really motivated me.

And then next to that, there is also just because. Philippus had sold his previous start up. We kind of had some financial backup to do this. So I guess that's also important to mention is like we're not students. We we're not like just graduated without any money, which makes the jump to becoming in in the hacker a lot bigger.

You know, we had the financial stability to say, okay ay, we're gonna like take our idea was actually to take one year and just see where to the start. Fy, he would go. And you know what? What would worst thing be that could happen?

I mean, nobody thought about the pandemic, of course, but you know just what the I D in the back of our heads, that we can always just find a new job insect somewhere. Of course. Like the most difficult thing for me was not having like a recurring salary or a paycheck every month.

But when you make mini as an employee, you know it's just Normal. You have your yeah money coming in every month, but when you make like you're first still and like dally is very cheap. So when we make like twenty nine dollar a month with a new client, that feeling is incredible.

more exciting IT.

It's so exciting. You're like you get like the stripe ert and you're really like looking at the screen and thinking, oh my god, you know, someone just paid for something we made and feeling is still the same through the years. I don't think that will changed. So obviously.

you didn't start making money right out of the gate of a wild path to get to where you are. The first company that you started that every pair of my rate are was hot spot. And and I think you started this.

And like february of last year, like a month before the global pandemic became a huge thing and everything started to getting locked down. So and this, unfortunately, was a travel. Tell me about the idea behind hot buy and how we worked .

when we were travelling. We were in mexico tulum, which is like the meat of influencers. We're kind like joking about all the influences is that we saw on the beach. And at the time, there was also a lot of negative press and 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? Just task, all the school places around the world listed, and, you know, we connect them with travel influencers and and they can boat to work together. Travel influencers can basically travel for free.

Instead, the hotels and the hotels get free marketing, which IT was free for influencers. And hotels would be to paying, paying customers. And we just reached our clients because we also had no experience and travel and whatsoever. So we just did a lot of calls, outreach like mass emails to hotels, and that's how we got our first clients.

But because of the panama here, 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 minute before that, and we didn't just want to quit. So Philip started like building features, and I was writing content. And we tell, you know, when things get Better maybe by summer because how long can this thing like? Well, probably ly, you know, we'll be ready launch again.

Classic sound optimism right there .

of course by summer um yeah, we realized that we were kind of fuck so yeah, you know we were also both working full time on this no salary half of our year that we gave our selves to start. This thing was gone IT didn't seem like things. We're gone to get Better. And first.

that's super tough. You have like that that sort of runway set out for yourself like i'm going to take two one year to do this and then yes, half of the year goes by like I basically ground zero. The thing I tried do not work like i've been in that position. I know many thousands of people have been in that position. Had you not get demoralized when you realized that you spend so much time on something that's probably not going to work?

Yeah, I mean, we did get demoralized. But of course, he had this for me was also the first time doing this. So you know we still wanted to make something out of IT, but I think I was mainly phillip, I 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 fund tracer for health workers um in belgium to give them a night uh for free on the hotel. And then we also needed a form again and we just started talking about forms.

And yeah just one day we tell tie there's not really a form builder that we really like, but there's there's a thumb, but you know they they're also expensive or all they have like this unknowing payroll that we don't like. What 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 yeah 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 M V P and did IT. I think that .

most people will work on something. And you see, I don't know, like chinese is form and is so frustrating. Stop there, right? Like I used a million products a day or a week.

I like this is very frustrating. IT couldn't Better. But then I don't necessarily think i'm going to quit what i'm doing and then start a competitor to these other things. I guess in your situation, there was more obvious because what you were doing wasn't working that well and the pandemic wasn't coming to an end and they didn't look at for your travel business. Where are you topping 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 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 thought that through.

So this was more of, you know, IT had some combinations of things we both like because I worked with a lot of forms and marketing automation tools, and I was quite enthusiastic about IT. And then Philip, we both really heavy notion users as well. And he also really like the interface, and he wanted to create something similar. So if I just I don't know, I just made us happy thinking about IT and that's how how things started.

Yeah, I like starting your ideas that way because I starting from an emotional center. One of my interest is in who do I want to hang out with and talk to you like quite tools when I want to build. It's that and like that's that you know obviously the most sorrow idea of validation process. But it's a very least you're making sure that you're going to build something that you enjoy working on. You check in those boxes and those are some of .

the most important boxes to check, definitely. And also because held spots 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 this is something realized to when we started working in IT.

Yeah ah I think that the probably most important question when you're doing 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 at least people that you're going to have fun talking to everyday and negotiating with and selling with and haven't jumping on calls with? And if you like turns out to be like hotel owners and then I see protect evy and like that's not really your people. You might not like that piece very much.

No indeed. And now our first customers now a lot more like just like us, you know people like .

businesses .

yeah and creatives and and designers and the hacker's and just is just a very interesting space to be right.

So the other hesitation people might have in your situation is, okay, maybe the existing players aren't to that good. I 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 has ever been solved. Most of what I talk to you, who wants to start a company, have this idea, and I had that they can join a market, they can build a competitor, something that already big. Why did that year stop you?

We didn't really have that fear that much. I remember at the time we were also also joined the White combinator started school. And every is like with a weekly call and every call we did everyone in kind like need to get feedback to each other.

Everyone said, but it's not you like, it's not the start of because it's the new idea. And I just came so frustrated because I mean, how do you still invent something new? Is I thought that easy note days like something that hasn't been made before. So for us, IT was more about how can we make a Better or difference and and convince people to choose for us that way.

It's funny there. So much like there's such an addiction to new things in the site is weird idea that like to have to start up, everything must be new. And it's what if you look even at the biggest of ec funded startups of all time, like people building computers before apple built computers, people like they are searching as before google, the society, ks.

Before facebook, like there are e commerce companies and bookstore s before amazonia, 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 is an ny hacker, you need to solve some completely and solve problem is kind of as weird to me where that comes from. I think it's almost like we equate startups with this idea of inventions.

But IT started in an invention, or two completely different things started as a business. It's meant to help people solve problems. An invention is, you know, creating some new thing in the world.

Mayor may not work, helps anyone's of anything. Might just be a patent that goes nowhere. And so I think sometimes get sucked into this idea of looking as sort of as inventions when that's not necessarily the case.

Obviously, coming up, the idea is not you know the end of of the journey, you've got to figure out what to do next. And you've made IT a long way sense. Like was that earlier making tens of thousands of dollars, you've got ten thousand customers. What's the first step in that journey after .

you come up with the idea? Yeah well, I guess you had the first step was building the MVP, like I said before, was was really basic and we just like really started really small and shared with friends and family and just asking for for some feedback.

And once we did that, so we like split up in rounds, we we make like groups of okay, we're gone as these friends first because they're a bit more six seventeen than we're gone to ask the friends that have no clue what the form is just to see like would they be able to 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 um started reaching how do we know companies we've work that some starters that we know.

And then just I started making lists of people on product terms, on the hackers that seemed interesting, that might be interested in giving us feedback um on our products. And I just started emAiling dm them this basically really called out to each like I might we're building this. 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 that allowed you notice, start a founder to be time to open our message and and try IT out for bit. And if they did, a lot of people liked IT like they had a lot of feedback, but they like the idea and they liked how how the form builder worked. So we kept on doing that. And where we were 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, sort of tacking me. And we're like Philip as a software engineer, can work on this project and try to get them every p the door. But what he's doing that is 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 I think that's what makes IT work for us. Is that like we're like fifty, fifty, fifty percent product and developing features and fifty percent marketing celin, whatever needs to happen. I guess that's a good baLance.

You have a background in marketing like I was mentioned the earlier, you want a lot of time working in tech companies basically fulfilling these rules. I think most people who are sharing these companies have idea how to do marketing at. And so i'm curious like if your background help to you out and how someone can go from not known anything to figure out out how to promote their arms and get those first users in the door.

I guess the biggest difference is that my drop now is a lot more hands on than I used to be. Like I managed a team and the produce company where I worked. 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 news letter. You know, what ool do I use? How do I do this? I need to make visuals to share on social media.

I can do that myself as on the problem, you know, I need to make a landing page and workflow or work quick. Fig more like 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 a bit more? He had just reaching out to people and and asking for feedback that that would think I didn't really me know I hadn't really done before.

Are there any like resources, books or people at philosophes that use like followed or learn a lot from to help you sort of grow telly? Where are you learning from?

Thought like everyone on twitter and the hackers read IT like I just I I read a lot of things that I just see online. I think a few years ago, I read the interview on marketing, how they how they started IT. They haven't ebl con that. And I find that, that is a great resource to really explains how they started from zero to where they are. Now a big part is about content marketing as well.

Yeah in our common marketing is good. It's like a PDF sort of their growth hacks and how they got to their first thirty thousand customers or whatever. But like it's ironic at that book itself and of itself is a marketing tactic for them because the PDF, I think it's a one hundred and fifty pages or something. It's like you have to like put in your sort of email address and your name and set up and they start marketing intern to you as they help me with this.

But it's a great way for them to do this generation. And yes, so smart as well because they describe IT. You know we are started, but we started making content for startups because that was they were also our target audience.

yeah. And I guess that's also what we are trying to do. You know like we're building in public were sharing our booth that journey just because we like to do that as well and we like to do we like to learn from other founders. But at the same time, these other founders might also be potential ti users.

They have a quote. And here from Simonson ic, he says, people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do IT.

And their point in this in this book and marketing is that basically in the past, everybody used to feature based marketing. They would say what your company does and then tell people why they need that. But nit comes as a SaaS changed that landscape.

And now that it's so competitive, you can't to french yourself on product alone. You need to reversion marketing and tell people why your company exists, get them to buy in to your mission and then tell them how are you doing what you do and then tell them what IT is that you do. I wonder how much you agree with that. Is that like useful feedback for a new and I acre.

I think definitely. But I also would not take that like too seriously you know because in the end, like with tally, we also use a lot of like our product doesn't marketing. You know our new features are also content.

They are also marketing for us. And that's not necessarily about the why you know like why would you use study, you know, 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 in over of obviously not enter come, we cannot start creating content about these 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 I think it's definitely valuable for yourself to think about IT and to know why people would use your product. But I don't always take IT like that black and White that out in our landing page, for example.

I think for a lot of productivity tools, whether it's you know document editing tool like notion or form builder like tally, the sort of feature updates or super juicy, like 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 like what passport of notion because i'm so excited to bit or I just started using the sort of VR product that let you sort of collaborate with your peers like his office set in called horizon workroom. I have so excited about IT is so cool.

And every time there's an update that I want to read, all the features are so that makes sense that like fta users who already existing users like they are gonna want to know when you release new features because they are already so familiar with your software and so bought into your mission that IT resonated them. But I onder what what IT is that you do to reach people to basically grew up ten thousand users who didn't know what tally was before. You know, who are these people who are willing to switch over from google forms a switchboard from type forms, or who possibly weren't using anything and decided .

to start using telly? Yes, our first users, you know, were basically called out reach. And then we launched on product tents in march, and that was just cave as a big, big boost. And in user growth just gave us a lot of visibility.

And after that, I was really a combination of us like creating more content and trying to push our domain authority a bit and S C O S to rank of the higher, which is it's quite it's quite difficult for us, I must admit, combined with is trying to answer as many questions on every form you can imagine a about forms, especially on twitter, you know type form I don't know if you you know has recently changed their Price. So IT became basically more expensive and a lot of people were not happy with that, which was, of course, of goods yeah something good for us because on twitter, like everyone started complaining about that time from became so expensive. And the good thing was that we didn't even have to uh, mention tally, but a lot of our user are started like mentioning tally alternative.

I mean, it's such a key shape of talking to our users, which we really do every day, growing our own little community um on slack. Now we we have a couple of hundreds of users that are so engaged and that really help us mid 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 everyone who fills in the form is that the form was made with study.

So we have like powered by a batch, which is really important channel for us. That also the main reason why studies is so free because we can just stretch a lot mark people in this way. And I guess just what helped us a lot for the no code communities.

Like for example, in france, there is 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. And no, it's a foreign builder. Yeah.

there is so much cheer to talk about. I want to talk about no code and catching these big waves and how founders can take advantage these big opportunities like you have. I want to talk about product driven growth. A lot of the people i've talked to recently have had products that kind of advertise themselves and you have the same thing going on with tally in your badge. And so that's a really cool to grow maybe before those like your timely because you launched you said i'm protetch in march of this year yeah but you launched like tally, you kind of open IT up to users well, well, before that I wasn't like, yeah you spent six months coating and then once you were done, you open the door and in your first you just came from bottoms. Had many months and late twenty to twenty of using the product and putting a Price tag on and getting your first users in the door before you decided to launch on product time yeah.

the main reason was, you know, because it's such a competitive market, we didn't want to launch our MVP on product times 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 is and this feature.

So we did want to have like a set of basic features that would put us at least you know somewhere close to, uh, competitors before we launched on product time 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 we do know like the value of a product and launch, and I can get get you a lot of visibility and we also don't want to launch every month on product turn. So we try to prepare IT well. And yeah also as I said before, actually we wanted to launch some broken in december twenty twenty, but our daughter was born three weeks early unexpectedly so we had to uh delay IT and also it's our first child and we thought I will just do IT afterwards but yeah that was not really possible so somehow IT became march so that second yeah, that's the biggest reason we wants to have some users already just so they would support our life. And then we just hugely when the estimated having a baby and those two things made us launch only in much.

tell me about that because my best friend lend just had a baby in january and she's an add. Hacer SHE had a very successful business before that and it's very passive. So she's been able to like continue run her business and taking care of baby and and hasn't been super duper or stressful as you might know what might think.

I wonder what the experience has been like for you because tell who is brand new like you hadn't even launch some product on yet and you're doing all this stuff what you are like six, seven, eight, nine months pregnant, presumably. And then you're done everything since then with a brand new newborn that even feel about the water. What's happened like.

I mean, IT definitely was super stressful for us. IT was not not that chill being pregnant with fine because then we were also logged down, so we had nothing else to do then pregnant and working on the product.

When SHE was born, we had a lot of difficulties with like you know, we wanted to work on IT, but we also, of course, we wanted to spend time with baby and especially, you know, for me as being the mother and you know, press feeding 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 to a 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, I also just, yes, spend more time, which is, I guess, around three weeks before he really started working again. So we just decided to take that time and then we tried to, uh, when he was a bit older, to work in shifts so someone would work in the morning and when broken afternoon and and then in the evenings yet we tried to like make schedule but that just 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 use and once we accept the dead IT was fine but SHE yeah he stayed home for like five months with involved um usually kids go to day care after three months.

How do they fund like the daycares and in belgium pay for out of pocket as a parent?

Yeah there's two types. There's like private one. So you just pay whatever they ask and there's like government to run ones and then you just pay by we are salary is based on what you what you earn. You pay like a fever day. And yeah, I think our dollars started going after five months, which was great for us because IT just gave us some kind of ridding m again, although IT is like more like a nine to five because yeah, you have to bring her and pick up on time. But at least he gave us like some some more focus time during the day.

cool. So now you, phillip, are with baby accepted that you can work as many hours as you wants to where things are a little bit Better when you've accepted that. And yeah, stop trying to fight reality.

And you've launched some product on and things are going well. And there are a few things that I think you ve had going for you that I mentioned earlier than I want to die in to you. The first one is this concept of sort of product driven growth with your product to grow itself.

I love talking about this because is 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 critical example is something like a hallmark gift card.

Nobody buys a gift and then just keep IT. Like you buy a gift card, you sign IT right and know in IT, and then you give IT to somebody else. And so IT automatically advertising itself.

Yeah, but I was talking to john, no, who who started ghost, a blog ing platform. Nobody like write a blog just for themselves. I mean, some people do, but the vast majority people like send their blog links to other people.

And so then once they do, what kind of advertising as A K 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 coworkers or customers or employees or whoever. You want to fill out your survey. And then they get to see the little badge, he says this was built with tally 我 just think is such a good way of your growth。

Yeah, definitely. And for us, because we're experimenting now as well, we we first made this little batch, but we had no idea like how shall we look. And we we 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 to IT. They thought they were applying for something on the form.

So a lot of like just not quality of needs, but it's just just because this form had a lot of traffic. And now that we have a bigger volume of users, we we can A B tested, which is quite interesting. And now we're seeing there's like one very simple button that just sets, you know this form is made with di.

Does this is performing Better than the others? But that that its cool to see just because our early users, let's say, like a product company are started if they would use IT there, the people that would fill out those forms would usually also be people that were interested in tell you and then they would say, like all the form looks kind of goods, you know, how did you how did you make IT? And in that way, IT kind of kind of sells itself. The other thing .

I want to to ask you about before 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 gluck, is where preparation with opportunity timing is such an important part of business success. And I was kind of cool about timing is IT IT can be more forgiving than I think a lot of people realize.

So for example, you said you you're so lucky to have built tally during this time period or like no code has actually been a big up and coming thing for like two maybe three years now. And so this is a window in time that you can miss, but it's a really, really big window in time or at any point in time during those years. It's essentially a growing wave. And if you start building for you know, months ago, nine months after that.

you're gona be much bigger. yes. Yeah, definitely. I think for us, we just noticed that IT was a big and growing space once we launched ali because so many people were just started talking about no code tools and no community started inviting this. But also um when we launched on product and we 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 go category.

yeah they can see the waves to in the transfer big and they see a path for you to get much bigger than you are right now. And just like the sort of products of growth thing because this is something you can think about as a founder early on, if you want to, you can easily so of look out to the world and be like, what's big?

You know what's what's popping right now? Like what are people talking about? A lot of people talking about notion it's growing tremendously.

You can go on google trends and see, like every month, more people talking about notion. Maybe I want to build something that looks like notion and that plays on notion, that integrates of notion. A lot of people talking about no code.

A people were tracking crypt to and web three point out, like there are all these trends that and given time at at least five, ten to twenty fifty trends that you can have sort of built 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 is your advice for some other and I hackers who are perhaps in the same position you're in a year and a half ago where you're not sure they're not sure what a is the best one to work on. They are not sure the thing work all 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 is no new payments coming in, you can get the motivated really fast. But in the end, we just need to find word works and do IT again and over and over every day. And it's not always the most fun tasks and and things to do.

I guess life as a foundation 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 one hundred, two hundred people per day. And you know it's not fun to do and you don't see an immediate results, 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 dredge work, especially in the early days when yeah, even if you making great drives, you might not necessarily see that in the numbers when you first getting started. And don't be afraid to be piped if things arent working. Marine Martin, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me was really nice talking to you.

Can you let listeners ers know where they can go one more?

But watch up to with tally, definitely. So yet we have our website. I so you can follow us on twitter that's at Sally forms, or you can follow me as well as where I share most of our of our journey and it's at mike Martin some twitter. All right, thanks again. awesome. Thanks so much.