How Tally got its users
Radical free tier in a market where the incumbent charged a lot, plus brand in the form footer seen by every respondent.
Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- A referral loop that runs on other people's forms, with no ad spend behind it
- A public record of your own revenue, plus comparison pages and templates that LLMs can cite
- A product whose output is public by default, and a free tier radical enough to spread it
- Founders willing to answer support themselves instead of handing it off early
Viral product in 2026
The best channel when it exists. But it is decided in product design, not in marketing.
Everything on this channel →The play
6 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Scrape Product Hunt and Twitter for creators and founders, then cold-DM each one asking for feedback on your MVP.
done whenYou can name the people who replied, and they sit in one list you keep by hand.
- 2
Give away unlimited forms and submissions on the free plan, charge one flat Pro plan, badge every free form with your name.
done whenA stranger can build and publish a form from your homepage with no account, and every free form carries the badge.
- 3
Launch on Product Hunt twice: once for the MVP, then again for a rebuilt version of the product.
done whenWeekly signups after the second launch stay above your pre-launch weekly average, once launch week is over.
- 4
Put the founders on support with fast replies, run the user community yourself, and close it when it outgrows you.
done whenYou read every support message yourself, and a feedback board, public roadmap and changelog replace the closed channel.
- 5
Publish your revenue milestones on your own blog, plus competitor alternative pages and a public page per template.
done whenEvery template and comparison page has its own indexable URL, and the revenue posts run as an ongoing series.
- 6
Ask every new signup where they found you in an onboarding survey, then fund only the channels it names.
done whenThe survey output names specific search terms and people, and you have stopped paying for anything it never names.
The product itself
read from tally.so, live“The simplest way to create forms”
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Bootstrapped, revenue published by the founders
What else they ran
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.