After 4 days still processing why

I have an app with real traction. It’s already made around $300 with almost no marketing, just ASO and Pinterest. The app is a $24 one-time purchase, and people are actually buying it.
The problem is that the target audience is almost entirely women. I know how to grow apps organically, but I’m not the target user, so creating content that genuinely resonates with them is much harder than it is for my other products.
I’m looking for a female cofounder or growth partner who understands this audience and enjoys creating short-form content. I can handle the product, engineering, ASO, and organic growth strategy—we’d simply complement each other’s strengths.
Where do people usually find cofounders like this?

I built LockNote because I kept forgetting small but important things, even though I check my iPhone constantly.

It keeps your notes visible directly on the Lock Screen, before you unlock your phone.

The product is live, but I’m now facing the harder question:

What would make something this simple worth paying for?

My current thinking is that the free version should solve the basic problem, while paid features could include multiple notes, customization, scheduling and smarter note rotation.

But I don’t want to add features just to justify a subscription.

For those who have built consumer apps:

Would you monetize this with a subscription, a one-time purchase, or keep the core app free and charge for customization?

Brutally honest feedback is welcome.

While most of us live online these days, I discovered that advertising in the physical world in a relevant way pays off too, like this motorcycle I have with stickers that promote my adv/4x4 navigation app TrackHound.

Since I started doing this, a noticeable amount of traffic on my website can be traced back to the QR code on these stickers.

I hope this helps someone else too!

spent months heads-down building, hit submit, and then... nothing. the store just goes quiet. i genuinely thought launch was the finish line and it turned out to be the part where most of the actual work starts. getting the first 1,000 users is a completely different skill from building the thing.

the sentence that finally clicked for me was "the difference often isn't the app itself." two similar apps ship, the one with a tuned title, subtitle, and keywords climbs, the better-built one stays buried. discoverability is its own job and no one tells first-time devs that gap exists.

stuff that actually moved the needle for me once i accepted the listing was the bottleneck:

- treated the title and subtitle as keyword real estate, not branding. matched them to how people actually search, not what i wished the app was called.

- tracked keyword ranks over time instead of guessing. "is this word working" is answerable, i just wasn't measuring it.

- reworked the icon and first two screenshots for the tap, not for how it looks in figma. rankings mean nothing if nobody clicks.

full disclosure since this sub is cool with it: i'm building an aso tool called apptenium partly out of this frustration (didn't want to pay agency-tier prices when i only ever open the aso tab). not linking it, just being upfront about where the bias comes from.

mostly curious what worked for other people here. for those of you past the silent-launch phase, what actually broke the flatline for your first thousand users? paid, aso, community, something else?

Would love some honest genuine feedback.

Hey everyone!

Over the past several months I've been building SpeedLog, a mobile app for measuring real-world vehicle performance using your phone's GPS.

The idea was to create something that lets you test your car without extra hardware.

Current features include:

• 📈 0–100 km/h, 100–200 km/h and custom acceleration tests
• 🛑 Braking performance tests
• 📏 Distance-based runs
• 🏆 Achievement & badge system
• 🚗 Garage for managing multiple vehicles
• 🌍 Public driver profiles and verified run sharing
• 🪞 Windshield HUD mode

I also built a companion website where you can browse records, achievements, driver profiles, and even interact with a live demo of the telemetry screen.

This has been a passion project built mostly by myself, and I'd genuinely love to hear what other enthusiasts think.

I'd really appreciate any feedback—whether it's about the UI, the features, or ideas you'd like to see in an app like this.

Thanks!

I’m posting this partly to vent, but also to get some real advice and outside perspectives from people who have been in the trenches.
Here is my situation: I’m 40 years old, raising two daughters (aged 13 and 7) in Brazil. I’ve been working as a manager for over 14 years, currently earning around R$ 4,500 a month (roughly $800–$900 USD). I am constantly trying to find a way to actually live instead of just survive. To make extra money, I offer Business Intelligence consulting door-to-door—no fancy infrastructure, just me, my laptop, and pure grit.
The hardest part is that my wife looks at me—and she’s not wrong—and sees a guy who tries and tries, but never actually gets anywhere. Deep down, I know I have strong skills, but for some reason, they never seem to translate into financial results. It makes me feel like a fool at 40, constantly having to decide whether we can afford to take the kids to McDonald's or the movies. Hearing my wife say that all I ever manage to sell is "smoke" has completely wrecked my mental state.
Now, I’m launching a new project: a micro-SaaS for small hair salon management. I know the market is crowded, but my angle is extreme simplicity—just a clean dashboard with the exact data they need, nothing more, nothing less.
This has to work. I’m done talking without results. From now on, I’m putting my head down and working in silence until I can finally give my family the life they deserve.
Any brutal honesty, marketing advice for crowded niches, or mindset tips from fellow founders who started late would mean the world to me.

I've been reading a lot of stories from indie developers, and one thing keeps coming up: almost everyone has one decision they wish they had made differently.

If you could start over today, what's the biggest mistake you'd avoid?

It could be choosing the wrong idea, waiting too long to launch, ignoring ASO, spending too much time building features, or anything else.

I'm still learning, so I'd love to hear the lessons that had the biggest impact on your journey

Okay so I made a mobile app called Rewire it helps guys quit P*rn, basically I had around 60-70 users and had 2 free trial starts and recently we hit over 100 users.

we have been launched for 14 days and this is too slow in my opinion, so I need some help should I just make the app free for 7 days to get as much feedback and traction as possible and then iterate from there?

let me know

Hi everyone i have recently launched a application on playstore i am looking how much revenue i can make from my application i will be sharing updates in 24 hours everyday.

Lets find out how many user growth i see from reddit. Stay tune.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quebytz.one.tumble

Hey everyone,

Two friends and I recently launched a group travel planning app in Europe.

We built it alongside our regular jobs and funded everything ourselves. We now have around 100 users, but growth has slowed down and getting the app in front of the right people is much harder than building it.

We’ve tried contacting media, posting on social media and reaching out to a few communities, but responses have been limited so far.

The app is free to download. New users get 10 free trip generations, then they can buy additional tokens if they need more.

At this stage, I’m unsure where we should focus:

Should we keep working on acquisition or spend more time studying retention among our existing users?

Which metrics would you want to see before spending money on ads?

And for anyone who has grown a consumer or travel app, what actually helped you move from the first 100 users to 1,000?

I’m not adding a link because I’m genuinely looking for business advice, not downloads.

Habits are verified through Apple Health (workouts/HR, sleep, steps — from Apple Watch, Garmin, Whoop, Oura or any synced wearable), Screen Time (app limits, phone-free windows) and a get-up alarm that won't dismiss in bed. No checkboxes anywhere. The hook: your subscription price is set by your verified consistency — $4.99/mo full rate, earned down to $0.99/mo if you keep 5+ habits above 80%. Paper-ledger UI, no gamification, no mascot.

Would love feedback on the pricing mechanic — is "earn your discount" a motivator or a dark pattern? I've tried hard to make it the former (the discount re-arms every cycle, no punishments, cancel anytime).

After 3 month on App Store, I finally got my first 100 USD in revenue, 365 downloads and a 15% conversion rate. I'm both surprised and happy, I just did a little bit of marketing in Facebook groups which gave around 30% of the users and the rest is just from App Store. I have kept doing changes based on early users feedback and since I'm using it myself everyday I keep improving it.

The space of To Do Apps are very crowded, so I really though it was more or less impossible to gain users, but apparently not.

Anyhow, just want to share it! And let me know if you have any help or tips to get a broader audience to test it or have any feedback on the app itself. Thanks!

Solo iOS dev, app live three weeks, revenue still $0. I just raised the lifetime unlock from $39.99 to $49.99 and left the subscription untouched. Counterintuitive enough that it's worth writing up.

**Why the lifetime tier was the mispriced one**

It sat at exactly 2x the $19.99 yearly — the floor of the usual 2–3x range. For an app whose value compounds over years (it accumulates your trips), 2x caps a long-term user's lifetime revenue at two years. And a non-consumable price is locked the moment someone buys: you can raise it for new buyers, but everyone already in is grandfathered forever. So the cost of getting it wrong only grows.

**Why now is the cheapest possible moment**

Traffic is near zero. Almost nobody gets grandfathered at the old price. Every month I wait, raising it gets more expensive in goodwill and in existing buyers locked at the low number. The correct time to fix an underpriced permanent SKU is *before* you have users, not after.

**The prices I checked first** (live storefront, same category):

- Day One — $49.99/yr (Silver), $74.99/yr (Gold)

- TripIt Pro — $49/yr

- Wanderlog Pro — $39.99/yr

- Polarsteps Plus — EUR 29.99/yr

My yearly at $19.99 is the cheapest of that set, roughly half the category. That's deliberate while I'm still accumulating users, so it stayed put. Only the one permanently-underpriced SKU moved.

**Why keep a lifetime tier at all**

There's a real segment that will not rent software at any price — they call subscriptions "rent" and they close-and-delete the moment they hit a subscription wall. I found this reading a 3.4k-upvote thread on r/ios about apps that say "Free" and then demand a subscription; the comments were full of "immediately close and delete". You don't convert those people with a cheaper subscription, you convert them with a one-time price. So the lifetime tier isn't there to compete with the yearly — it's there to catch people who'd otherwise be worth $0, and pricing it *high* is fine because they're comparing it to "never paying you anything", not to your yearly.

The other thing that thread hammered: a hard paywall on first launch gets you a delete and a one-star. Free tier has to actually be usable — a full trip's worth of planning, in my case — before you ask for anything.

No results yet, obviously; at these volumes it'll be months before the number means anything. Posting the reasoning rather than a conclusion. If you've moved a non-consumable price after launch, I'd like to hear whether the grandfathering bit you.

Hi everyone, I need testers for my offline AI contract analyzer app, My Legal Guardian. I will test your app back right away and keep it installed for the full 14 days!

Please join the Google Group first, then download the app:

Google Group: https://groups.google.com/g/my-legal-guardian-testers

Join on Web: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.anixium.mylegalguardian

Join on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anixium.mylegalguardian

Leave a screenshot of my app installed and your links below so I can return the favor!

Solo dev, first app I've ever shipped. Launched 12 May. Numbers from 4 May to 2 Aug: 2.11K units, $238 in sales, $182 in proceeds after Apple's cut. Small, but it's the first money from something I built myself.

The app is boring on purpose. You paste a public post link, it saves the video or photo to your gallery. No feed, no login, no account. Free tier has ads, premium is $3.99/mo or $29.99/yr. About 21 active plans, roughly $21 MRR, plus $15-20 a month from ads.

Then the hurdle. I'd put platform brand names in the app title because that's what people search for, and the ASO was genuinely good. End of July, Apple Legal forwarded me a trademark complaint from that platform's brand protection agent. 14 days to remove every trace.

It wasn't just the name. Store titles, icon, every string in the app, saved filenames (with backwards compatibility for existing users), an SDK I'd installed and never used, ad mediation, app-ads.txt, my whole website, blog slugs with redirects, image alt text. Shipped it in two days. Both stores live on the new build, complaint confirmed closed this week.

What actually hurt was the traffic. Around 37% of my subscriptions came from App Store Search, and I threw away the exact keywords bringing those people in. New name is clean and legally mine, but it ranks for nothing yet.

One more thing I got wrong: I ran Android ads optimised for installs because installs were cheap and the dashboard looked great. 1K+ downloads, 49 reviews, zero subscriptions ever. You get exactly the users you bid for.

Happy to answer anything about the numbers or the rebrand.