Tally is one year old: our first year in numbers
Eighteen hundred teams, seven people, fourteen releases and three things that went badly.
On this page
Tally is one year old this month. A year ago, three of us shipped a product that could draw exactly one kind of chart. Today, seven people in three countries look after a product used by eighteen hundred teams. We promised to be open about how the company is doing, so here is our first year, in numbers.
The product
| Measure | Day one | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Teams using Tally | 12 | 1,840 |
| Events received per day | 40,000 | 210 million |
| Chart types | 1 | 9 |
| Releases | 0 | 14 |
The most used feature is the funnel. The least used is the forecast chart, which we will either improve or remove this year.
The company
We are seven people: three engineers, a designer, a growth lead, a support lead and a CEO who still answers support tickets on Fridays. We work remotely and meet in person twice a year.
Our monthly revenue passed our monthly costs in month nine. It has stayed above them every month since, though not by much.
We wanted to build a company that grows at the speed of its customers, not the speed of its investors. Year one says that is possible.
Maya Chen
Where the money went
| Cost | Share of spending |
|---|---|
| Salaries | 71% |
| Servers and data storage | 14% |
| Tools and services | 6% |
| Travel and meetups | 5% |
| Everything else | 4% |
Servers are the cost that grows fastest. Every new customer sends more events, and we keep them for two years. This year we will spend real time making storage cheaper.
What went well
- Customers stay. Nine in ten teams that paid in month one still pay today.
- Support is fast. The median first reply is under two hours, from a person.
- We shipped every few weeks without a single release we had to undo.
What went badly
- We launched a referral programme that did not work, and we wrote about why.
- We were too slow to add retention charts, our most requested feature for eight months.
- Our documentation fell behind the product. Several customers told us so, kindly.
Next year
We will add three people, all in support and engineering. We will finish the feature everyone keeps asking for, and we will rewrite the documentation from the start. We will also keep writing posts like this one, including the parts that make us look less clever.
