You raise, you build, you grow, you exit. That's the startup script. We're trying to write a different one: @TallyForms just reached $6M ARR, bootstrapped and purely product-led, with a team of 10 and over 2.5 million users. Six years ago I wouldn't have believed you if you told me this was possible. Yet here we are. Here's what happened on the road from $5M to $6M, including what went wrong.

After a slower summer in terms of signups, we’re back. Last week close to 40.000 users (all-time record) signed up for @TallyForms. 44% of them came via AI assistants: 1. ChatGPT 2. Claude 3. Gemini 4. Other (Perplexity, co-pilot, and others)

berlin friends: our @TallyForms meetup on sept 23 is down to the last spots (115 people signed up, wild) drinks + form yapping + zero sales pitches, at futura house in kreuzberg

Since day one, our whole strategy has been giving @TallyForms away for free. We're a bootstrapped PLG company. Free forms and the "Made with Tally" badge are our biggest growth loop: Someone builds a form and publishes it. Respondents fill it out and see the "Made with Tally" badge. Some of them sign up and build their own form, which gets its own respondents, who see the badge again. Today, we have over 2 million users, with 17k of them funding our growth. We don't see that as revenue left on the table. We see it as acquisition spend, cheaper than any ad we could buy. Fewer free forms out there just means a slower loop. When we shipped Tally AI, we made the same bet again: make it free. We didn't do that because we were unsure how to charge for it (we had no idea what it would cost us). We did it because we’ve spent six years building the simplest form builder out there and removing friction wherever we find it. Putting a paywall in front of the thing that removes the most friction, and gets people to actually build better forms, faster, would undo the whole point. The data backs it up. In the last 30 days Tally AI processed 420,000 prompts (used by around 30% of new organizations), and Tally AI users: 📄 publish 10% more forms 📥 receive 37% more submissions 💳 convert 2x more from free to paid Tally AI makes the flywheel spin harder by doing a crucial thing for our viral loop: it gets forms built and published faster, leading to more users discovering Tally.

I check where and how @TallyForms pop up every day and I'm never not surprised. A podcast that collects listener questions through a Tally form in the show notes A researcher in the UK studying pregnancy and postnatal support A UX designer running a survey to redesign the menus of their favorite zombie game A founder's "$0 marketing stack" with Tally as the forms layer A soccer fan who polls the subreddit after every match and publishes player ratings Looking forward to seeing what y'all build tomorrow 🫡

AI growth at @TallyForms. We surpassed 1M AI tool calls in August (MCP + Tally AI assistant combined). MCP calls: Apr: 75,135 May: 90,007 Jun: 105,507 Jul: 169,985 Aug: 341,795 Tally AI calls (phased rollout): Apr: 85,379 May: 82,712 Jun: 383,021 Jul: 688,735 Aug: 766,524 Inspired by @zenorocha's update.

We have multiple @TallyForms meetups around the world coming up in the next few months. Some organized by us, some by the community. It's a deliberate bet on things that don't scale: slower, messier, and harder to measure. But meeting people in real life, hearing their stories, and getting unfiltered feedback is more important than anything else we do at scale. Even with only 30 people in a room. We’ve done some meetups here and there in the past, they spontaneously happened, but now we’re ramping it up with our Tally Meetup Framework. Here's how our marketing team of 2 runs them: 1. Ask who wants to organize something. We posted in our community Slack and in our newsletter and made a list per city. 2. Pick a co-host per city. We don't have an ambassador program. We just reach out to long-time Tally power users we've been in contact with, ideally Tally friends with their own community or space. Our informal bar: they build real things with Tally, they talk about it online, and they can bring people in. 3. Chat on Slack. We communicate via our community Slack and always have a quick call first to see if there's a match on both sides, before locking anything in. 4. Set a date and keep the program simple. The host shares how they use Tally, and I join (in person or remotely) for a founder AMA about the story behind Tally. ~45 minutes of program, max. The real value is people talking to each other. 5. Create a @LumaHQ page with the host as co-host. We announce ~4–6 weeks out, share it on our socials and in our newsletter, and let Luma send their built-in reminders. 6. Overbook on purpose. We aim for 30–40 people in the room, so we allow up to 100 registrations to cover no-shows. 7. Make the space feel like Tally. We pick venues that feel like home, nothing too corporate. We made fun merch and decoration to send along (currently figuring out how to get boxes to the other side of the world in an efficient way). 8. Cover the costs. We pay for the location, drinks, and a photographer (good photos make the recap and give the host something to share too). 9. Close the loop. We always ask for feedback afterwards. We share the photos, and we spotlight the host and their work. Hosting should be a win for them, not a favor to us. 10. Turn it into a checklist. Everything above lives in a Notion task template, so each new city is a copy-paste, not a restart. We learn from every meetup and adjust as we go. As always: quality > quantity. We’re keeping this intentionally small as we’re just getting started.