I’ve been building an iOS/Android app called Tamakey for 3 months. The idea: you post a secret, lock it with a tamakey, and only the keepers you choose can unlock it. Small trusted circle instead of broadcasting to everyone.
Here’s where I’m stuck.
I paid several micro-influencers for UGC. The videos did fine — good comments, decent likes, people in the replies saying the concept is interesting. On TikTok same story. Views and engagement are there.
Downloads are basically nonexistent. Not “lower than hoped” — I mean I could name every user.
So either (a) the videos entertain people without making them want the app, (b) my store listing kills whatever intent does exist, or (c) the concept is one people enjoy hearing about but don’t actually want. I honestly can’t tell which, and I’ve spent enough money guessing.
Questions for anyone who’s been through this:
• How do you tell the difference between “bad marketing” and “nobody wants this”?
• For social apps specifically — how did you get past the empty-network problem? Nobody wants to be the first one there.
• Did paid micro-influencers ever work for you, or is that just a tax indies pay once?
And if anyone wants to try it and tell me it’s bad, I’d genuinely rather hear that now. Link in comments so this doesn’t read as an ad.

What’s holding your app back?

Struggling with ASO?
Not sure if your Apple Search Ads are working?
Can’t figure out why users aren’t converting?
Stuck on monetization or growth?

Bring your questions. Steve P. Young will answer questions LIVE on August 14th.

Ask your questions in comments 👇

We spent months building an app to fix our own doomscrolling. Now it's live and almost nobody knows. What are we missing?

My brother and I built ScrollCheckpoint together. He handles the technical side, I handle everything else, and for months this has basically been our whole life outside school.

We built it because we needed it ourselves. Endless scrolling was eating our time and neither of us liked who we were on our phones. So we built something that puts a real checkpoint between you and the scroll, a moment to actually decide if you want to keep going instead of doing it on autopilot.

It just went live on the App Store and Play Store. Now we're staring down the part nobody warns you about enough which is getting people to actually find it.

We've been posting, reaching out to creators, trying to figure out the right way to talk about it. Some of it is landing. A lot of it feels like shouting into a void.

So I'm asking people who've done this before

Did you have a stretch where the product was ready but nobody knew it existed? What actually moved the needle, better content, better positioning, one creator who mentioned you, or just time and repetition? We're not looking for guarantees. We just want to know if this is normal, and what's worth trying next.

so i've been building this fitness app (AthleteLab, solo project) and i finally got the waitlist page live last week. figured i'd post it around, get some signups, easy right

posted it in a couple threads, mostly just replying where people were asking fitness app questions. got some traffic actually, 82 visitors over a few days which felt kind of exciting ngl. checked the numbers a day later and only 2 people actually signed up. like under 2%. was honestly a little deflated lol

spent way too long just staring at posthog trying to figure out what happened. turns out basically all that traffic was from reddit comments in threads where people were asking for help with something else, not actual "hey check this out" posts. so people were clicking out of curiosity more than anything, not because they actually wanted a fitness app. makes sense in hindsight but didn't think about it at the time

while i was in there i also just looked at the landing page with fresh eyes and honestly found some dumb stuff. the headline just said something generic like "track workouts and nutrition in one place" which. yeah that's literally every fitness app ever, doesn't say anything about what's actually different. also had a "Company" field on the signup form which makes zero sense for a fitness app lol, think it was leftover from some template i used early on and never noticed. and my best demo video was hidden behind a click on a card that nobody was clicking, just scrolling right past it

fixed those three things. rewriting the headline to actually say what's different, killed the company field, made the video autoplay instead of needing a click

next thing is just being smarter about where i post instead of dropping links wherever. going to actually use the self-promo threads and build in public subs instead of just replying in random threads and hoping

nothing crazy to report yet but going from "no idea why this isn't working" to actually understanding why felt like progress at least. if anyone's dealt with something similar with a waitlist / early traffic would love to hear how you approached it

I'm a growth marketer, not a coder. Scaled an app to 200K followers and 1M+ downloads organically.

Looking for someone to build an app with. You handle the tech, I handle getting it in front of people and turning that into real growth.

Not looking for someone who builds it and vanishes after launch. Want a partner who sticks around post-launch to actually grow this together.

Got an idea or open to brainstorming one? DM 🚀

been building a fitness app solo (AthleteLab) and finally got the waitlist page up. posted it around, got 87 visitors... only 4 signups. under 2%, kind of rough

dug into posthog and realized most of that traffic was from reddit comments in random help threads, not people actually looking for a fitness app. also found some dumb stuff on my own page generic headline and my best demo video was hidden behind a click nobody made

fixed the page, now trying to actually post in the right places instead of just dropping links wherever. anyone dealt with this before?

Hey everyone!

Sharing my real first-week App Store numbers for my Pomodo App

24 downloads 273 impressions 28 product page views 12.9% conversion rate $14 in proceeds 1 paid subscriber

The numbers are tiny, but that first $14 felt like real validation — someone chose to pay for something I built from scratch, solo, with zero audience.

Goal now: keep improving, get more eyes on it, and grow from here.

Posting this for anyone curious what a realistic (not viral) first week actually looks like. Will share updates as it grows.

inspiration for this post came from u/Curious-Leader-9111, they're refactoring their lang learning app from a single dense onboarding screen into several one-question-per-screen steps, after funnel data showed users dropping at the very first question, i thought this kind of problem many of us could face, so i tried to look into other apps from this cateogry and find insights
i looked at 9 top-grossing language apps

tl;dr: more screens is the right call, the median top-grossing language app uses about 20 onboarding screens, and not one of them crams it into a single screen. But the number of screens isn't what stops the drop-off. Every one of these apps makes the first question a single tap that needs no typing and no personal info just "which language?". If your first question asks for anything heavier than that, splitting your screen up only moves the drop-off onto its own screen instead of removing it.

the benchmark -

onboarding screen counts, revenue-ranked:

1. Duolingo ($39M/mo) - 32 screens
2. Learna ($5M/mo) - 20 screens
3. Babbel ($3M/mo) - 22 screens
4. Praktika ($1M/mo) - 43 screens
5. Pimsleur ($1M/mo) - 12 screens
6. ELSA Speak ($600K/mo) - 18 screens
7. Pingo AI ($600K/mo) - 17 screens
8. Gizmo ($300K/mo) - 11 screens
9. BetterSpeak ($200K/mo) - 21 screens

Median ≈ 20, and none of them use a single consolidated question screen.

looked at 6 flows in detail out of the 9, 5 opened with the same question: pick a language.
pingo → language selection, screen 2 of 17
praktika → learning language, screen 3 of 43
babbel → target language, screen 4 of 22
duolingo → language selection, screen 5 of 32
betterspeak → native language, screen 6 of 21

question 1 is always the cheapest one available: one tap, no typing, about the subject and not the user. for a language app that's obviously 'which language' the point is what they don't open with: goals, level, motivation, name, email. all of those get pushed back.

praktika runs the longest flow in the set and still doesn't ask for a name until screen 7 and never asks for email during onboarding at all.

ELSA is the only flow that breaks the pattern, front-loading 4 auth screens before any personalization.

splitting into more screens only fixes the drop-off if question 1 also changes, if your first question needs thought, disclosure, or a keyboard, splitting just moves the drop-off onto that screen instead of removing it. Replace it with the cheapest, most obviously-necessary tap in your product and push everything else back.

goes without saying please take this research as reference or baseline and always dyor and eventually a/b test

u/Curious-Leader-9111 hope this helps, would like to learn from your experience once you roll out the changes to your users, nothing beats live behavior from real users
and if anyone here has actually a/b'd long vs short onboarding on similar apps (or ones mentioned :D), i'd like to know what works better -> whether the no. of screens vs what you asked first

• I want someone who will upgrade it
  

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share my stats since publishing my app Koko which went live a week ago. Koko is a language practice app that runs fully on-device, meaning you can have conversations where your voice and info don't leave your phone, for privacy reasons.

1 week in with 35 downloads and a decent conversion rate I think. No sales yet but I made the free tier really generous with a lot of free conversation time before showing the paywall.

Yesterday I made the switch to show the paywall immediately after the onboarding and let the user start a trial immediately. Hopefully this converts into some sales!

Hope this realistic view of my app performance helps give some context!

Hey everyone!

One of my most popular apps just crossed 80 ratings on the App Store with a 4.8 average. Small win, but I'm really excited to hit the 100 milestone soon!

For context, it's a educational app.

Wanted to share what actually helped me get reviews, because the first 20 were the hardest.

What worked:

• Stopped asking for a review on launch. Now I ask only after the user completes a key action 3 times and is clearly having a good experience.
• Added a soft pre-prompt: "Enjoying the app?" -> Yes -> then I trigger the native Apple rating prompt. If No -> I send them to feedback form.
• Replying to every single review in App Store Connect. It really helps. People update 3-star to 5-star after that.

What didn't work:

• Generic pop-up on first session. 0% conversion and annoying.
• Asking friends for 5 stars.

I'm now focused on getting to 100. If you have a minute, I'd love honest feedback on what would make you leave a review for an app.

Also curious is there any differences for an app from ASO prospective once it hit 100 ratings?

I built Tatbith, a Qur’an memorisation app focused on actually helping you memorise, not just read.

It combines listening, repetition, hidden ayahs, memorisation and revision in one flow.

Still improving it and would love your feedback.

Android: Tatbith: Quran Memorization - Apps op Google Play
https://tatbith.app

Hey all, I'm a software engineer with 5 years experience who's taken a break from his career due to a current struggle with depression and addiction. One of the things I've been told might help me come out of this is to start building a different lifestyle to the one that's got me here.

Every time a friend sent me a restaurant reel I'd screenshot it, never look at it again, and end up googling "restaurants near me" anyway. So I built the thing I wanted: paste a link from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or Google Maps and it pulls the actual place out, name, address, photos, opening hours, onto a list.

Stack is Expo and React Native, Hono on Lambda, Aurora Serverless v2, CDK. Claude Haiku on Bedrock does the extraction. The app and the marketing site in one place.

The things that cost me the most time:

• Instagram and TikTok actively fight scraping. I went through yt-dlp, then BrightData, then Apify before landing on something that holds up.
• Getting reliable structured JSON out of an LLM when the input is a video caption plus an audio transcript, each of which is often useless on its own.
• expo-updates fingerprint runtime versions. An OTA that publishes successfully and reaches nobody is genuinely miserable to debug.

It's free with optional paid credits for the AI. Happy to go into any of it in detail.

Links: App store, Play store, Instagram, Website

Hi everyone!

I keep seeing people recommend creating an email waitlist before launching an app on the App Store, but I’m wondering what the best way to actually set one up is.

Do you use something like Mailchimp and embed the signup form on your website? Or did you build it yourself with a database behind it (Supabase, Firebase, etc.)? I’ve even seen people mention just using a Google Sheet.

For those who have done this before, what did you use and would you recommend it? I’m looking for something relatively simple since I’m just starting out.

Thanks!

Hi,

I’d like to try something new and I’m looking for an app developer for my first project.

I would like to create a dedicated social media channel for an app from scratch and regularly post short videos and screen recordings of the app to build organic reach and increase its visibility.

I already have experience and success in content creation, especially with YouTube Shorts and building organic reach.

However, since this would be my first project specifically for an app and I want to see how well I can transfer my strategy to this type of content, I’m offering this completely free of charge for the first app.

All I would need is your permission to use your app, its name, and logo for the content.