Marie Martens and Filip Minev are life partners based in Ghent, Belgium. Marie spent 10 years in B2B marketing. Filip is a software engineer whose previous startup, Delta (a crypto portfolio tracker), was acquired by eToro in 2019. Together, they make one of those rare founder combos: one builds, one sells.
In 2019, while traveling in Mexico, they conceived Hotspot, a marketplace connecting travel influencers with hotels. They launched in February 2020 and grew it to roughly $1,000 MRR. Marie quit her marketing job. They flew to Bangkok to work on it full-time. Then COVID hit. Customers churned. Flights were canceled. They flew back to Belgium with a baby on the way and waited six months hoping the pandemic would pass. It didn't. They shut Hotspot down.
While building Hotspot, they had used form builders to collect influencer data. Google Forms was ugly. Typeform was beautiful but expensive. Jotform was clunky. They saw a gap: no form builder was both good-looking and affordable. They were also fans of Notion and its document-style editor. What if a form builder worked like writing a Notion page?
By summer 2020, they started building. The MVP launched in September 2020 with no monetization. The product was completely free. Only one person paid in the early months, a user who loved it so much that Marie created a special $9/month plan just for him. They launched on Product Hunt in March 2021, hit #5 of the day with 695 upvotes, and doubled their user base from 1,500 to 3,000.
Growth was slow and steady. By October 2021, they had 11,000 users and $5K MRR. By February 2022, $10K MRR with 20,000 users. Still just two people. They handled all customer support themselves for the first two years, which created burnout but gave them an intimate understanding of what users actually needed.
The growth engine is the free tier itself. Tally's free plan is absurdly generous: unlimited forms, unlimited submissions, conditional logic, file uploads, payment collection via Stripe. All free. Typeform charges $39/month for less. Every free form displays a small "Made with Tally" badge that links back to the site. About 40% of new users come through that badge. Another 30% come from organic search. The conversion rate to Tally Pro ($29/month) is about 3%, but with 35,000 new users signing up per week, the math works.
Then something unexpected happened. In 2025, ChatGPT became Tally's #1 referral source. Over 2,000 new users per month signed up via AI tools, with actual numbers likely much higher. When people ask AI "what's a good free form builder," it recommends Tally. Claude followed. Marie posted that AI-driven signups were driving 35% of all new user acquisition. Nobody planned for this. It just happened because the product was good enough for AI to recommend.
Last month we welcomed 100,000 new @TallyForms users. And once again, AI became our #1 acquisition channel, driving 35% of new signups. One thing that stood out: new users discovering Tally via @claudeai.
Today, over 1 million users have used Tally. The team grew to 11 people. ARR crossed $5M in April 2026, five years after launch. Still bootstrapped, still no paid advertising, still no sales team. The tech stack is Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, and MySQL on Google Cloud. Marie and Filip now have two kids and still run the company from Belgium. In 2026, they publicly stated they are "optimizing for quality, not revenue." A bold stance from a bootstrapped startup that proves you don't need to chase growth at all costs.
Over 5 years in building @TallyForms, and we just crossed $5M ARR. Still bootstrapped. Still a tiny team (11 now). Still growing organically. Still obsessively listening to users.