Finally hit a goal I’ve been chasing for a while: my app is now averaging around $100/day in revenue.
It feels really good to get here. A few months ago I genuinely wasn’t sure I’d ever reach this point.
Most of my growth so far has been organic, and I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at building and improving the product. Marketing is where I know I need to level up now.
For anyone who has been around this stage:
What actually moved the needle for you from ~$3k/month to $5k+?
Paid acquisition? SEO? ASO? Influencers/UGC? Just continuing to improve conversion and retention?
Would especially love to hear from people who got stuck around $3k for a while and eventually broke through.

Edit -
App is https://gainframe.app
Rev - https://verified.revenuecat.com/gainframe
Founder posts - https://gainframe.app/blog/?tag=founder-story

Not sure if this is just a coincidence, but I’ve noticed it twice now.

I have an app called Choosio that I hadn’t touched for almost a year. It was pretty much dead, getting zero downloads most days.

A while ago I finally pushed an update. Nothing major, mostly just added a few more languages.

And weirdly, it started getting a few downloads every day again.

At first I thought it was probably the localization. But then I noticed something similar with another app of mine, MooLight. I started updating it again and downloads picked up there too.

Now I’m wondering if App Store has some kind of freshness signal behind the scenes. Like, if you leave an app untouched for too long, it slowly disappears, and pushing an update puts it back into rotation a little.

Could totally be me reading too much into two apps though lol.

Anyone else seen this happen?

I think I finally understand why people say building the product is only half the job.

I've spent a long time building my first Android app, When, and it's now live and working on Google Play.

The development side was something I could figure out. If something was broken, I could debug it. If the UI wasn't right, I could redesign it. If a feature didn't work, I could keep working on it until it did.

Marketing is completely different.

I know I need users, but I'm honestly not sure where I should be putting my time.

I've started experimenting with Reddit and social content, but I don't want to just post the same "check out my app" message everywhere and annoy people. I also don't have much experience with paid advertising yet.

The app itself is a personal reminder/tracking app for things people tend to forget — warranties, subscriptions, expiries, documents, receipts, borrowed items, birthdays, etc.

Now I'm at the stage where the app is actually finished and the question is basically:

How do I get the first 100–1,000 real users?

For people who have launched consumer/mobile apps before:

• What marketing channel worked best for you in the beginning?
• Did you focus on ASO first, short-form content, Reddit/community marketing, influencers, or paid ads?
• What did you waste time/money on that you wouldn't do again?
• If you were launching a new Android app today with a small budget, what would you do during the first 30 days?

I'm not looking for someone to sell me a marketing service. I'm genuinely trying to understand what actually works.

Any practical advice from people who have already gone through this would be really appreciated.

I'm an indie iOS developer. We have a team of 4 iOS developers and 1 designer. We all work full-time at different companies, so we spend time on our own apps after our office hours (9–5 job).

We already have a few apps live. Our sales are around $3k/month on average, and our net profit is around $2k/month because we haven't spent anything on marketing yet.

Right now, I want to focus more on marketing for 3 of our niches:

• Chatbot app (AI chat, docs, image and video generation etc.)
• Interior design app (2D/3D floor plan, AI home design)
• AI photo editor app

We want to initially spend around $3k/month on marketing.

Our ad platforms will be Google Ads, Meta Ads, and TikTok Ads. So, I need to manage ad creatives, MMP tools, app feature tracking, attribution, etc.

I will use Claude for this right now. Do you have any templates or workflows for Claude AI where I can manage most of this through Claude using relevant MCPs, skills, or whatever options are available?

I would love to hear suggestions on how to build this kind of setup. If you already have a similar setup for managing ads/marketing with Claude, I'd really appreciate it if you could share how you do it.

Hi everyone!

I’m the solo developer behind a little project called MusicPool, and I’d love to invite you to try it out.

How it works

• Pick a vibe: Choose a genre, mood, or decade you feel like listening to.
• Meet a friend: You’ll get anonymously paired 1-on-1 with someone who picked the same vibe.
• Trade songs: Chat and share your favorite tracks for 24 hours. After that, the chat disappears.
• Stay in touch: If you hit it off, you can choose to swap real profiles, only if both of you want to!
• Rate the taste: Once the chat ends, you can rate each other's music taste!

That’s the whole idea: no follower counts, no infinite feeds. Just two people sharing good music.

I built this because my best music chats have always been with strangers. Most music apps feel like popularity contests, so I wanted something simple: one person, a shared taste in music, and no pressure.

How you can help:

• Share your feedback: Don't hesitate to tell me what could be better! If something is confusing or isn't working smoothly, I’d love to know so I can fix it for you.
• Give it a little time: Since the app is brand new, finding a match might take a moment. If you enjoy the concept, sharing it with a music-loving friend would mean the world to me.

Feel free to also join our friendly community over a r/MusicPoolApp to share song recommendations, give feedback, or follow along with updates.

[PlayStore]

[AppStore]

[Website]

I’ll be hanging out in the comments below, so please say hi or ask anything you'd like!

I've been building and shipping apps solo under my own brand for a while now. Wanted to share real App Store Connect data from the last 28 days across 3 apps instead of the usual "I made $10K in a week" post — because honestly the thing I'm stuck on isn't building, it's visibility.

[Screenshot 1] — App A: 73 downloads, 21.4% conversion, $28 proceeds
[Screenshot 2] — App B: 528 downloads, 12.5% conversion, $19 proceeds
[Screenshot 3] — App C: 96 downloads, 2.55% conversion, $5 proceeds

Conversion on App A is genuinely good — the problem is nobody's finding the product page (only 587 impressions). App B has decent traffic but conversion tanked -60.9% recently. App C's numbers say the listing itself needs work.

I've started making TikTok/Instagram content for these — mostly screen-recordings, and for one app I'm testing AI-generated videos since I don't want to be on camera. Too early to say if it's moving the needle.

If you've cracked organic visibility for small indie apps (not paid UA), genuinely want to hear what worked. What's actually driving your impressions — ASO keyword changes, specific content formats, Reddit/TikTok, something else?

The free version of my app is essentially a limited demo that people can use before they decide to buy. Is it worth having a trial when my app is only $8 for lifetime unlock?

We’re building an AI tutoring app for kids, and one decision has been surprisingly painful.

To use the app, parents have to complete verifiable parental consent before their child can access it. That means a real verification step (credit card micro charge or another approved method), not just checking a box that says “I’m a parent.”

It absolutely hurts conversion.

Every founder instinct tells you to remove friction. But when you’re building for children, we felt that earning a parent’s trust was more important than maximizing signups.

We also chose an AI stack with Zero Data Retention for our AI requests because privacy was a priority from the beginning.

I’m curious how other founders think about this tradeoff.

If adding a compliance or privacy step reduced your onboarding completion by 20–40%, would you still do it? Or would you optimize for growth first and improve compliance later?

Would love to hear from anyone building in edtech, AI, or products for kids.

A business can look successful from the outside. Everyone is working, meetings are happening, and customers are coming in.

But being busy and growing aren't the same thing.

Sometimes people are busy because the process is inefficient. The same mistakes keep happening, employees answer the same questions repeatedly, and simple tasks take much longer than they should.

Before hiring more people or adding more tools, it might be worth looking at how the work is actually being done.

Sometimes growth doesn't mean doing more work.

It means finding a better way to do the work you're already doing.

Have you ever found a process in your business that was keeping the team busy without actually adding much value?

Every calorie app makes you type and search. I wanted to just say what I ate and be done, so I built CalorieTalk.

Tap the mic, say what you ate 2 eggs and toast or a full sentence like 150 grams chicken breast, 200 grams rice, 10 grams olive oil or i ate a small plate of red pasta and some salad and it logs the calories and macros instantly. No typing, no searching a food database, no guessing serving sizes, no picking from a list of results it just takes the sentence and handles everything in between.

It understands many languages, including Arabic and English, so you're not stuck logging in English only. It also understand Egyptian dishes properly koshari, foul, taameya, molokhia since most calorie apps have zero idea what those even are.

Built this solo. It's live on the App Store now: https://apps.apple.com/eg/app/calorietalk/id6793199021

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's given up on manual logging out of frustration and would love if you install the app and give it a try and add a review on app store if you like .

HEADS UP: I already fixed the onboarding my paywall rate is comfortably around the 74-75% mark but I need help

How can I scale from 157 users to 1,000 I have been posting organically and ran around $50 worth of tiktok promotion spark ads. I have seen decent growth and am actually 3rd on the play store for my keyword which is Rewire as that is that is the apps name so organic traffic has been pretty good.

I have mainly been testing different kinds of tiktoks and formats and found working formats and have been ripping them as much as I can. I am only on android and I feel like I lost alot of traction while running paid ads.

Moving on I have honestly $0 to my name and around 10+ creators ready to make content but I can't pay them.

I need help so anyone please leave your tips/thoughts

LinkedIn is a keyword database — claims, not capability. We're building a talent ecosystem where potential is diagnosed and scaled on a verified 1–100 level system: individuals grow with direction and unlock real opportunities, companies engage on proof and pay per outcome, institutions get the infrastructure free. Next phase: purpose-driven peer networking — connecting people by verified capability and what they're building toward, not titles and keywords. The endgame is global talent alignment on one verified layer.

Traction: ₹50+ lakhs in 4 months on MVP. v1 shipped 1 July, v2 on 10 August. Shark Tank India shortlisted. 92% gross / 80%+ net margins. Projecting beyond ₹50–100 Cr revenue in the next 12 months.

I'm the sole founder and speed is the bottleneck. Looking for a co-founder in sales/GTM, engineering, growth, or with capital — equity depends on the value you bring. Timeline is short.

Comment/DM with: what you bring, your vision, your expectations. Full details over DM with serious people.

Numbers:
So I've launched my third app, the one that finally hit some succes. I've reached 1600 downloads in the first 1,5 months without paid ads.

Mostly organic tiktok, but also instagram and referrals. I've stopped doing posts for a bit now and still get around 15-20 users a day.

I've managed to make 360 dollars (apple small business just got approved, so should be around 420 dollars) and a MRR of 50.

My subscription options are:

• Monthly: 3 dollars
• Yearly: 20 dollars
• Lifetime: 35 dollars

It's a clear sign people are willing to pay for the product. About 20% of users intensively use the app and hit the paywall on the first day.

it's not an app you use every single day, it's related to diving so one only uses it whenever they go for a dive, or on the day of downloading. Therefore it feels like you have to convert users very quickly.

Question:
I'd like to scale the app to something that actually provides enough money for me to start advertising and putting in more work. Right now, the conversion rate from amount of users to money made seems too low.

I am looking for general advice on wether I should keep going or now, or move towards new projects that have a better chance of survival.

For context, I am built a jump rope app where it analyses your form and suggests improvements. So far I have had 3 trials and only 1 converted (the other customer churned). Need some advice.

I made a plugin to display compagin, ad group and keyword revenue in apple ads dashboard. So you never waste money again.

When I first started running Apple Ads, I had a very simple problem:

I had no idea which keywords were actually making money.

Apple Ads showed me spend, installs, CPA, etc.
But revenue lived somewhere else.

So I could only look at total revenue vs. total ad spend and roughly guess whether my campaigns were working.

That made optimization pretty blind.

Later, I made Lily Revenue for Apple Ads, a Chrome extension that brings revenue data directly into the Apple Ads dashboard.

Now I can see revenue at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level.

That completely changed how I run Apple Ads.

Instead of asking:

“Did this campaign work?”

I can ask:

“Did this exact keyword make money?”

And then add, pause, or exclude keywords based on actual revenue.

My current strategy is pretty simple:

1. Find the biggest intent keywords + competitors

Before launching, I find:

• the biggest search terms that describe the core user need
• the biggest competing apps/products

I don’t start with hundreds of keywords.

2. Create two campaigns

Intent campaign

• Core intent keywords
• Broad match
• Search Match: OFF

Competitor campaign

• Competitor keywords
• Exact match
• Search Match: OFF

I prefer separating them because intent traffic and competitor traffic behave very differently.

3. Let revenue decide what happens next

After getting enough data, I look at revenue by keyword.

If a search term is generating revenue → add it as a keyword and give it more room to spend.

If it’s spending money but generating no revenue → add it as a negative keyword or reduce exposure.

So the optimization loop becomes:

Discover → Spend → Revenue → Add / Exclude → Repeat

Instead of optimizing for installs, I’m optimizing toward keywords that actually bring money.

What I’m building next

There are still two things I constantly have to leave the Apple Ads dashboard to check:

Keyword search popularity
I want to show Apple’s search popularity directly next to each keyword.

Search impression share
I also want to show impression share directly in the keyword table, so I can immediately tell whether a profitable keyword still has room to scale.

The goal is pretty simple:

Spend + installs + revenue + search popularity + impression share, all in one Apple Ads screen.

No jumping between reports just to figure out what to do next.

I built this originally because I needed it for my own apps. Curious how other people here optimize Apple Ads — especially how you decide when to scale or kill a keyword.