PLG company: Tally.so

Every week I will feature a PLG company and break down how they win.

Company and Product

Tally – Online Form Builder

Founded and bootstrapped in 2020 by a married couple pivoting to a new idea

Revenue milestones: $10K MRR (Feb 2022), $60K MRR (May 2023), $100K MRR (Feb 2024), $2M ARR (Mar 2025)

2025: 500,000+ users

Competitors: Typeform, Google Forms, Jotform, Formstack, Paperform

Industry/Category

No-code form builder / SaaS

Target User Persona

• Primary: Startups, freelancers, SMBs needing free and fast forms

• Secondary: Large businesses, non-profits, creators, and individuals collecting data or payments

• Specific: Users frustrated by paywalls, volume limits, or complex interfaces in traditional form builders (sadly, almost all the other form builders are like this)

PLG Model Used

Super Generous Freemium with Viral Branding and Community Flywheel

• Free tier: Unlimited forms, submissions and core features

• Pro plan ($29/month or $290/year): Removes Tally branding, adds custom domains, advanced collaboration, custom CSS, email notifications, partial submissions, and other advanced features

• Viral “Made with Tally” badge on free forms drives organic growth

• Community engagement and outreach to Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, and Slack

Time to Value (TTV)

• Immediate (minutes):

  • No sign-up required to build a form, until you launch it.
    “Very PLG test-drive it first.”

  • Instant preview

Onboarding Experience

• Frictionless: No login required to get started

• Intuitive interface, with typing, no drag-and-drop

• Template gallery

• Progressive feature discovery as users grow with the product

• Active support and community resources

Read more tips to creating feature discovery and advanced features to paywall:

Key Growth Loops/Virality

• “Made with Tally”: Every free form displays a “Made with Tally” badge, exposing thousands of respondents to Tally and driving new signups

• Community Advocacy: Power users and creators share Tally forms and templates in online communities, Product Hunt launches, and social media

• Word of Mouth: Satisfied users recommend Tally for its generous free tier and ease of use

• Build in Public: Founders document their bootstrap journey for other startups and entrepreneurs to follow

PLG Compounding Strategy

Every user gets value right away by making and sharing their first form in just a few minutes. No signup needed.

When people share their forms, the “Made with Tally” badge shows others where the form came from. This helps more people find out about Tally and want to try it themselves.

As more users join, they build forms and share templates. This creates a loop where the community helps each other and shares new ideas for using Tally.

The founders, Marie and Filip, share their journey in built-in-public. They talk about their wins, challenges, and what they learn. This honesty builds trust and makes people feel part of the Tally story.

With every new form and template, Tally becomes more useful and popular. Over time, teams and businesses start using Tally for their daily work. This makes Tally sticky, hard to replace, and it becomes the go-to tool for collecting information and working together.

P.S. If you have 2 min, please take this three-questions survey about this newsletter for me @ https://tally.so/r/3EaPyl 

New here? Here’s what to expect each week:
- Monday: spotlight a lesser-known PLG company
- Tuesday: my PLG experience
- Wednesday: Memes on product, AI, and marketing
- Thursday: tactical growth tips
- Friday: raw accounts of my startup journey

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. Building ClarityInbox. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.