Founder-run, manual cold outreach to prospects found on Product Hunt and Twitter, before any public launch.

“We scanned Product Hunt and Twitter and made lists of hundreds of prospects and started doing cold outreach, asking for their feedback.”

Every product update was shared as a mini-launch across social media and community channels, ahead of and alongside the official Product Hunt debut.

“We made mini-launches of every product update and shared them on social media, Reddit, Indie Hackers, no-code, and startup communities or Slack channels.”

Official public launch on Product Hunt in March 2021, after building a ~1,500-user base through pre-launch outreach.

“more than 1.400 upvotes, hundreds of positive reviews, dozens of investor calls, and +600 new users”

The launch doubled the user base and is credited as an instrumental exposure event.

“We doubled our user base ( from 1.500 to 3.000 users) after the launch and Product Hunt has been an instrumental step in gaining exposure.”

The badge is embedded in every free form; people who fill out a Tally form see it, and some sign up themselves, continuing the loop.

“Free product → Word-of-mouth → More people create forms → More visibility from “Made with Tally” badges → More Pro conversions”

About 2% of the free users who come in through this loop convert to the paid Tally Pro plan, which is described as the company's core revenue engine.

“About 2% of users eventually upgrade to Tally Pro”

"Search" is named directly alongside the badge and Twitter as one of Tally's three main acquisition channels at the $20K MRR stage.

“Currently our main acquisition channels are:”

Tally's onboarding survey started showing a sharp rise in users citing AI tools as their discovery source, coinciding with GPT-4o's rollout of default web browsing, which surfaces niche tools like Tally and recommends alternatives based on user intent.

“ChatGPT became our #1 referral source.”

By the following update, AI search had grown from a new referral source into the company's largest channel, ahead of the long-standing badge loop.

“What has changed, since last year, is that this viral loop is no longer our biggest acquisition channel. AI-powered search is.”

Tally's first-ever paid search ads, launched around the $2M ARR mark, described as a test of reaching a more targeted set of users than organic channels alone.

“We also launched the first search ads in the history of Tally, an experiment to reach more of the right users for us.”