Built a small habit-tracking app solo over about 6 months, nights and weekends around a day job. Did the standard app-marketing stuff, feature-highlight reels, clean UI walkthroughs, App Store screenshot montages set to music, the whole polished playbook everyone tells you to do. Some weeks two or three downloads, plenty of weeks literally zero. Six months in, total installs sat at 80. Eighty. I have more Reddit karma than that lol.

Had the removal request half-filled-out in App Store Connect, ngl I was fully ready to just quietly kill it. $0 MRR after half a year of nights and weekends felt like a pretty clear sign.

While looking into what to even do with about $60 of leftover ad credit before pulling the listing (didn't want to just let it evaporate), I got sidetracked watching other small app accounts instead, classic productive procrastination, and found this screen-recording video of someone using their own app for real, mid-mistake, absolutely losing it laughing at a bug that clearly just happened live on camera. 40-second video, maybe 200 views, nothing special on paper, but something about it stuck with me.

Had a genuinely annoying bug in my own app that same week anyway, so I screen-recorded myself hitting it and reacting exactly how I actually reacted, zero script, zero retake, closed my laptop and went to bed not thinking about it again.

Woke up to it sitting at 1.2M views overnight and just stared at my phone for a solid minute like this can't be real. By the end of that week: 14,000 installs. That's more than 175x every install I'd gotten in the previous 6 months combined. First real subscription revenue landed that same week too, about $340, first dollar this app had ever made after 6 months of absolutely nothing.

That removal request is still sitting there, unsubmitted, and honestly it's staying that way now. Every quiet, zero-download week before that clip is exactly why the bug reaction felt real instead of staged, you can't fake that kind of "oh no" on camera. It was never wasted time, it just hadn't found its moment yet.

TL;DR: 80 downloads in 6 months, one unscripted bug reaction video blew up to 1.2M views, 14,000 installs in a week, first revenue ever. Still processing it tbh.

Everyone here is selling their apps like hot cakes.
Here is a screenshot of my app that didn't do shit yet.

After bitching about my product on here, here we go! First sale.

Hey, I’m trying to market my app through Reddit, but I don’t want to come across as spammy or get banned from any subreddits. Does anyone have advice on how to find the right communities, provide value, and promote the app naturally? I’d appreciate any tips or examples of what has worked for you.

A lot of businesses spend time trying to convince people they need something.

But often, the best prospects are already out there asking for recommendations, complaining about a problem, looking for alternatives, sharing frustrations with existing solutions

Drop or DM:
- what you’re building
- who you help

I’ll look for relevant people who might be a good fit and share what I find.

If I don’t find anything interesting, I’ll tell you.

Here is full revenue and traffic with 75% margin, the main problem is as I am also freelancer + 9-5 employee I have no time and no knowledge for distribution and marketing. What do you think? How much can I get for my project which has both mobile app and website and mobile have 10+ downloaders daily

🌎 What if you could talk to anyone in the world, no matter what language they speak?
I’m creating MyWorld, a new way to connect people from different countries.
This isn’t just another random video chat. The idea is to use real-time AI voice translation so two people can have natural conversations even if one speaks Spanish and the other speaks Japanese, English, Korean, or any other supported language.
✨ Global random video chat
🎙️ Real-time AI voice-to-voice translation while you talk
🌍 Connect with people from different countries and cultures
🤖 Technology designed to make communication feel more natural
🛡️ Moderation systems to help keep the community safe
The idea is simple: your language shouldn’t decide who you can talk to.
I’m building the first version and would love to hear what people think about it.
Would you use a platform where you could have a real conversation with someone on the other side of the world? 🌎

I ask these two questions because I have been seeing a lot reddit threads, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, and just overall research saying that UGC is the way to go about promoting things. I have witnessed peoples products take off with even one viral UGC video, even if the entire video is ai (besides their product). I want to try this out, but at the moment I am working with a web app instead of a mobile one, and am wondering if UGC works just as good.

So I released my first app recently, it's called ShiftWell, basically a shift work app. My idea was that shift workers (nurses, hotel staff, factory guys etc) have two problems, managing their roster and swap requests with teammates, and then the sleep mess that comes with night shifts. So I put both in one app. Shift scheduling, team swaps, shared notes, plus sleep timing and it tells you when to stop drinking coffee so you can actually sleep after a night shift.

Core features are free, there's an optional premium for some advanced stuff but you don't need it for daily use. No ads either way. Figured that would lower the barrier.

The weird part is people are downloading it but nobody says anything. No reviews, no emails, nothing. I have no clue if they open it once and delete it or actually use it daily. Flying completely blind here.

For those who launched before, how did you get your first real feedback? Did you just message users directly, put a feedback button in the app, something else? Any suggestion is appreciated.

It's on both stores if anyone wants to see what I mean:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shiftwell/id6774994854

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.shiftwell&hl=en

I launched a period tracker app 22 days ago with zero marketing budget. I'm at 42 organic users total, and honestly, I'm hitting a wall on both App Store visibility and social growth.

Features:

• Period Tracker
• Meditation
• Magic Ball
• Daily Tarot
• Period Insight Cards
• Pet Care
• Games
• Partner Compatibility

It's a niche product combining wellness + spirituality. The dev and design work was brutal — we're proud of the actual product — but now I'm realizing that shipping something good doesn't equal people finding it.

Where we are:

• All 42 users came organic (no ads, no budget)
• Got positive feedback on product quality, but one constant note: font readability could be better
• We're posting on TikTok and Instagram, getting some engagement, but not translating to installs
• App Store listing is English-only (even though we have Turkish users reviewing)

Where I'm stuck:

1. ASO: Not sure if our keywords are wrong, if the listing just doesn't convert, or if 22 days is too early to judge
2. Social → App: How do people actually drive installs from TikTok/Instagram? We're posting, but the funnel breaks somewhere
3. Localization: We have Turkish reviews but no Turkish listing — should prioritize this?
4. Next move: Should we test Apple Search Ads with a small budget, or fix ASO first?

I'm not asking for viral growth, I'm asking for honest feedback on what's actually broken vs. what just takes time. If you've been in this spot before, I'd genuinely appreciate the blunt truth.

https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/period-tracker-moonville/id6766513532

Hi everyone,

So I realized the hard truth, I may have published an app, but I am very bad at distributing it. That's why I'm looking for a strong profile so we can collaborate and work together.

You distribute, I ship the tech you need.

You will be responsible for the entire marketing funnel, I'll provide initial capital needed. We will then invest 50% of the profit, you'll keep the other 50%.

If such proposal is of interest for you, contact me and we can discuss it further.

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo iOS developer and I've been building CVPilot, a small app that checks your CV/resume for ATS (applicant tracking system) compatibility. You upload your CV and it gives you a score, a breakdown across 5 criteria (with the exact lines it's reacting to), and concrete fixes you can actually apply.

I'm not here to sell anything — I genuinely want feedback from real people before I build the next features. Honest, even brutal, is exactly what I'm after.

A few things I deliberately did differently:

• No account, no sign-up — you just open it and use it.
• Privacy-first: your contact details (email/phone) are masked on your device before anything is sent for analysis.
• No fake locks or made-up "trusted by millions" claims — I really dislike apps that fake that stuff, so I tried hard to keep it honest.

You get 2 full analyses free — enough to analyze → apply the fixes → re-analyze and watch your score actually move. Matching your CV against a specific job description is the paid part.

What I'd love feedback on:

1. Does the score + breakdown feel trustworthy, or does it read like generic AI output?
2. Are the fix suggestions actually useful for your real CV?
3. Was there anything that made you hesitate to even upload your CV?

Link + screenshots below 👇 Thanks a lot for taking a look — every bit of feedback genuinely helps me decide what to build next. 🙏

Every time I had a “new” idea, I’d eventually discover three dead startups around the exact same thing. Usually after days :) So I built Déjà View. You describe an idea, and it researches its real-world predecessors: companies that tried it before, when they operated, when they shut down and who survived.
It’s live at https://dejaview.bsct.so Try it on your current idea and tell me if the report found anything you didn’t know about!

Hello!

I recently built an app in the habit tracking/no spend niche, which is (I know) very overcrowded. I've been working on improving my ASO, but the issue is that my app isn't even being seen - it has a really low impression count, and I'm looking for a way to improve this. I see that in order to "spin the wheel" I need some organic downloads, so I'm thinking of starting a TikTok account with posts about the niche of the app and how the app could fit into everyday life.

I know that the key is to be consistent, but has anyone succeeded at marketing their app organically using TikTok in an overcrowded niche? I'd be happy to hear what strategy worked for you - and if you're comfortable sharing your TikTok (on DM so no rules are violated), I'd love to see what kind of content actually landed :)

i used Expo + React Native cuz i thought that some day i could make my app

available on the playstore, but is it really worth it?

my app is live on ios only right now. solo dev, still

early on revenue. since the codebase is cross platform the build itself is

not the hard part, but from what i read the extra work is everywhere else:

push (fcm), store listing + screenshots again, a share intent that works

different than on ios, billing on google play, and then QA on a bunch of

devices instead of like 3 iphones.

so for the people who already did the jump:

did android actually move the revenue needle or was it mostly extra downloads with worse conversion? how much time did the port really take you, honestly? did support tickets explode?

im trying to figure out if i should do it now or keep pushing ios until it

pays for itself first.

I launched my app Greenhouse quietly to the App Store just to get a baseline of what I could expect from organic reach. 

For the first few days, I was getting about 20 impressions and 1-2 downloads per day.

After about 5 days, my impressions started exploding. All of the sudden I was getting 12,000+ impressions each day and I had no idea why.

After investigating, I found that I had been featured in a 'new apps' category in the German App Store. 

My conversion was horrible. I was getting 10% conversion of page views to downloads. I attributed some of that to the fact that browse traffic from the front page of the App Store wouldn't convert as well as search traffic, but I also felt that my English localized app and listing were holding back my random influx of German users. 

I spent 3 days localizing my app, listing, and screenshot to German, and it spent 2 days in review. I was also ferociously fixing some minor (and one major) bug that the influx of users were uncovering at a rapid clip. 

After a full day with the localized listing, I am seeing a lot more sustained usage of my app by the German users. And 9 days after being listed, I'm still ranked #2! Also, one of these users converted from a free trial, so this burst also got me my first revenue.

I did not expect this at all. I didn't nominate my app to be featured or anything. I consider this an extremely lucky break and honestly it has just been a really fun few days of watching and working! My understanding is you are on these lists for about a week, so I consider myself on borrowed time now since I am on day 9, so I'm just enjoying it while I can, and hopefully I can keep the momentum going!

Every mainstream assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — answers with a filter on. Half the time you get "I'd rather not" or three paragraphs of disclaimers before the actual answer. Got tired of it, so my friend and I built our own little chatbot that just answers, no censoring, no lecture. It's nothing huge. But before we sink more time into it, I honestly want to know: is there actual demand for something like this, or is it a niche toy? Would you use an uncensored assistant, and if so, for what? And if not — why not? Genuinely just after honest opinions here.

I've been building Port22 because I kept running into the same problem.

You leave Claude Code/Codex/Opencode running on a long task, it gets 90% done, asks for permission to run a command... and then sits there waiting until you get back to your desk.

Port22 puts that question on your phone instead. Every agent running on your Mac shows up on your iPhone with a live view of what it's doing, and when one needs permission you get a notification you can answer from the lock screen.

Your desk stops being the place you have to be. At home it talks to your Mac directly over your network. Away from it, it keeps working over cellular — a train, an airport, another country, same thing. Only your Mac and your phone can read any of it, and none of your code is stored.

Supported today

• Claude Code
• Codex
• OpenCode

Coming next

• Hermes
• OpenClaw

Setup takes about a minute:

• Install the Mac app
• Pair with your Apple ID (no account to create)
• Start coding

Works on your home network or remotely.

Pricing

• Free: 1 Mac + 2 sessions
• Unlimited: Founding - $19.99/year for unlimited Macs and sessions

Beta opens on or before July 31.

Waitlist Link below: Waitlist

Stop sending paid traffic to generic App Store pages. Create Custom Product Pages (CPPs) that match your specific ad hooks, and use contextual deep linking to route users directly into a tailored onboarding flow.

Hey Everyone!

This idea I've been sitting on for awhile, is really gaining traction! The iOS beta for Precursor: Hourly Screen Time has garnered over 200 beta testers in less than a week all organically.

If you want to test it out too, here's the link (all beta testers get Precursor+ for FREE for LIFE):
https://testflight.apple.com/join/ztGmutmP

Here is what i have learned so far:

1. You got to solve your own problems first, you have to be invested in the thing you're building. If you don't need it why should others use it?
2. You have to start early, not building, researching and understanding what's out there already, what gaps exist, why others haven't done what you're doing.
3. You need to get feedback, do not fall into the perfectionist trap. Build the core product to a steady state (Minimum Viable Product; aka MVP) and then get users to try it out and encourage people to critique your product don't be passive.
4. The internet is dead (dead internet theory), sorry you had to find out this way. And for the few of us that are actually humans, trust me that AI reply bot that you spent a whole day building to save you time is not sticking the landing. We can all "genuinely" tell that Claude or Chat GPT is managing your marketing, "Honestly, doing that was not the right call, and that's on you". LLMs can do a lot, but it can't be a person for you, you have to learn how to do that.
5. You have to try every channel to find your channel. Don't go all in on one marketing strategy at first, go with a shotgun approach, wait a week, see what's landing then reallocate your resources to the winners (that means time, money, and brain power).

That's all folks, would love to hear about any tips you all have had, I am really early in all of this too so don't be shy. When we share together we all grow together!

Feel free to drop links to your products too but also practice contributing to the conversation ᵕ̈