From Locksmith to Software Founder: Tim Bennetto and Pallyy

Night Study After Locking Up

Tim Bennetto worked as a locksmith for ten years. Attracted to the idea of an internet business, he paid a developer to build an app for Instagram and felt how quickly outsourcing costs added up. He decided he should be able to build the next product himself, and began spending his evenings learning to code. That groundwork later became the starting point for Pallyy, a social media management service.

The studying lasted about six months. On Codecademy, a free learning platform, he went through the basics for a few hours every evening and practiced by building small websites and tools. Later he worked through logins and dashboards, learning the pieces a real service needs. Whatever he studied went straight into a small piece of working output.

In 2019 he spent about 30 days building his first product, Share My Insights, a service for sharing an Instagram account's analytics with other people. It did not have the range of social media management features Pallyy has today. He shipped what he could build on his own and started watching how users responded.

The First Customers and a Plateau Survived on Savings

The response right after launch was thin. He posted it on Product Hunt, but with no existing audience or followers there was no visible result. His first paying customers came from a free Instagram analytics tool a friend handed over to him. By routing that tool's visitors to his own service, he reached about 100 customers paying $5 a month.

Bennetto was already working on Pallyy full time when he started it. Savings from his previous job carried him through the early period. He recalled working eight to ten hours a day with few days off. Money he had earned in his old trade kept him going while the new business did not yet pay enough.

Working full time did not move revenue for a while. Through early 2021, monthly recurring revenue sat at $1,300 to $1,500 for about half a year. On August 6 of that year he posted that he had reached $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue, noting he had already been focused on Pallyy for more than a year and a half. Even after he could build the product, turning it into something that supported him took a long time.

Moving from Analytics into Scheduling

The significant shift in this period was bringing the work customers actually wanted done into the product. When Instagram opened an integration that let outside services publish posts, Bennetto added scheduled publishing. Agencies told him they would only move over if they could also manage other channels such as Facebook and Twitter. He spent three to four weeks applying for integration approvals on several platforms and building the features. A tool for reading analytics grew into a service that handled customers' day-to-day posting work.

Learning to Sell

Bennetto later pointed to his own use of time as a cause of the plateau. He called spending the first two years almost entirely on development, with barely any marketing, one of his biggest mistakes. He said he then shifted for a while to roughly 80 percent marketing and 20 percent development. Besides deciding what to build next, his job became finding out who would use it and pay for it.

The method he ran himself was messaging potential customers on Instagram and inviting them to try the free plan. He also tried Google and Facebook ads, which he said did not work for him. Reaching out directly avoided heavy ad spending but took a great deal of time. Introducing the product and encouraging people to use it became work that had to continue alongside development.

A post on January 23, 2022 carried news that things had changed. Bennetto said monthly recurring revenue had grown 52 percent the previous month and another 58 percent so far in January. He added that he could now cover his living costs with something left over and keep working on Pallyy full time. That was the point where money from his own service could fund the next month of living and working.

He gradually added more ways to reach customers. He hired a content writer for the blog and social media posts while he built pages explaining the main features and pages aimed at people looking for an alternative to competing services. He improved search traffic and ran an affiliate program. Alongside direct outreach, he built paths that let customers find him on their own.

Turning Feedback into a Product Process

As users grew, he also changed how he collected their opinions. At first he sent emails asking for feedback, but the response rate was low and it consumed a lot of time. Bennetto set up separate boards for feature requests and bug reports in Canny, a feedback management tool, and placed links inside the Pallyy interface. Users could leave their thoughts at the moment they hit a problem or had an idea.

The feedback he received was ranked by priority and folded into a public development roadmap. Changes were announced through a changelog, which was also reachable inside the service. Customers gained a way to see how their requests were handled, and Bennetto kept getting reasons to improve the product. He said this approach saved him a great deal of the time he used to spend sending feedback request emails.

Hiring the First Developer

In October 2023, Bennetto announced that Pallyy had reached $74,000 in monthly recurring revenue. He also announced that he would bring an experienced developer onto the business he had coded by himself for about four years. It was a company built without outside investment. A business that had started out covering his living costs had grown to the point where he could bring in someone else's expertise to improve the product.

The first developer's arrival exposed problems that had built up while he worked alone. Bennetto had been shipping changes straight to the live service with no separate development environment. The new developer pointed out that this setup was too risky for several people to work in together. The technical cleanup he had postponed while adding features quickly became real work.

The developer reorganized the server-side structure and put together a system for granting staff only the access they needed. Bennetto said he was learning a great deal within a short time of working together. He was now changing a product he had once handled entirely on his own so that other people could safely modify and run it.

Bennetto said his motivation for starting a company was to build a better life. Seen as a career change, his path reached different stages at different times: leaving his trade and supporting himself, then sharing the work with colleagues. His savings carried him through low early revenue, selling turned the business into a livelihood, and hiring prepared him to run a product he had built alone together with other people. Becoming someone with a new profession continued for years after he left the job.