This case study shows how entrepreneur and YouTube creator Thomas Frank uses Tally forms to collect critical product development insights with a 30%+ response rate, influencing the direction of his web clipper tool, Flylighter.
Use cases:
User Research, Feature Requests, Product Development, Waiting List
When Thomas Frank needed a simple form tool for his business, adopting Tally seemed a natural fit. As a no-code educator, he was already deep in the Notion ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, Tally's text editor-like interface caught his eye.
"I discovered Tally on my own and made all the forms myself. It felt very Notion-esque, so it was very easy to use,” he says.
Sharing knowledge on learning, productivity, and no-code workflows through YouTube videos, courses, podcasts, and his blog, College Info Geek, Thomas has amassed over 3 million followers and customers.
When it came time to launch his newest product — a web clipper called Flylighter — this substantial audience gave Thomas the perfect testing ground for gathering product feedback. And that's exactly where Tally proved invaluable.
“I came from Google Forms, which worked fine, but having that block editor that I was very used to in Notion was very nice. We started using Tally for a whole bunch of different things — and now we use it all the time."
Finding the right feedback approach for a new product
When Thomas began developing Flylighter, a web clipper tool for Notion, his idea was clear: "I want to make the easiest, fastest, and most customizable quick capture tool for people who are doing research, content creators, and especially for students." As someone who often has 80 tabs open at once, Thomas wanted to solve his own pain point of efficiently capturing web content into his "second brain" in Notion.
"The original inspiration came from the lack of third-party Notion web clippers with extra functionality that actually used the Notion API," Thomas explains. "A whole bunch of them are out there that use hacky ways to do things, and I didn't know if I could trust those."
To build the right product, Thomas needed a systematic way to collect user feedback. He created a waitlist signup on the Flylighter website, but wanted to go deeper than just collecting email addresses.
"When people joined the waitlist, they got directed to a Notion page where we embedded a Tally form with a brief survey asking them what they're looking for in a web clipper," Thomas shares. "If you could wave a magic wand, what features would you want us to build? What are your pain points right now?"
Tally form fit right in with his existing Notion workflow — all he had to do was to embed it and it was good to go. "I know I have a tendency to want to overcomplicate things," Thomas admits. "I'll add too many questions to a form, or I will never actually create the thing that I want to create because I'm looking for the perfect tool.”
“It's best just to find whatever's easy. And Tally does make it easy."
A simple form with impressive results
Thomas carefully designed the post-signup form to capture key information while keeping it easy to complete.
"For our Flylighter waitlist, we had 2,500 submissions to the feedback form," Thomas notes. "I find that quite interesting because we only had maybe six or 7,000 people on the waitlist, which means over 30% of people who signed up took the time to fill out the form."
During the setup process, some of Tally’s features stuck out as particularly valuable for Thomas’ workflow. “One of them was Tally's ability to use default values in hidden blocks. That's actually quite useful for me because there are certain times where I want specific data to go into the Notion database, but I don't want that to be a field for the user to even see."
Behind the scenes, Thomas set up a data pipeline to make the most of all the feedback. "I have a workflow that goes to Notion from Tally, and then a connected Pipedream workflow watches that database and runs additional processing on it." This automated setup lets Thomas and his team use the collected data in various ways without manual intervention.
Validating future product ideas
The feedback collected through Tally validated Thomas and his developer Eli's brainstormed ideas about expanding Flylighter beyond its original Notion-focused concept.
"People definitely gave us a wider array of answers than we were expecting," Thomas shares. "A lot of people signed up for our tool and weren't even Notion users. Getting those broader answers actually gave us ideas that we could potentially pursue in the future."
This user feedback confirmed what they had begun to suspect during development: "We realized the foundation we've built here for the web clipper seems to be pretty useful. It would be a shame if you could only capture to Notion when other people out there are using tools like Bear or Obsidian."
Seeing this confirmation in the data gave them confidence to think bigger. Now they're not just building for Notion users. They're also exploring ways to support other note-taking platforms and even direct HTTP requests, with the latter already added to their development roadmap.
Creating a feedback system that simply works
As Flylighter continues to grow, Thomas plans to expand his use of Tally forms for targeted feedback from his most engaged users.
"We've got an insiders program where people can get access to our dev builds and early access to new features. Those are going to be the people I really want to hear from. We will absolutely have forms for bug reports as well as feature requests."
Thomas's approach to feedback collection has become a core part of his product development philosophy: "Create a very simple way to give maybe even just one piece of feedback. Bind that to a short link that you can easily share on social media, in YouTube video descriptions, or at the end of newsletters."
For maximum completion rates, he suggests: "Simply say, 'this is a 30-second form' to tell people this will not take very long at all” — the exact tactic Thomas has successfully used for his forms.
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