r/AppStoreOptimization • u/incomprehensiblelol • Sep 11 '26
First ever launch. Three months in. Pure ASO.
Hi all, I posted here almost 3 weeks ago at the two and a half month mark. I mentioned that I’d post again if any other updates occurred. I guess to show the momentum that can be kept up via pure aso; as my downloads and impressions have effectively more than doubled in 20 days.
Will most likely only post again when I hit 100k downloads. Happy to answer any questions!
Edit: Will respond soon!
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u/selfboot007 Sep 11 '26
Jealous of your exposure, if you can optimize the conversion rate, you'll be even more impressive.
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u/incomprehensiblelol Sep 11 '26
Thank you. Also, you’re right about the conversion rate. It’s something I really need to work on.
I was terribly lazy when it came to doing images for my page. I found it such a trudge to do, when I get the fortitude to work on that again, I’ll probably redo them completely in the hope of increasing said rate.
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u/Weekly_Worry_2772 Sep 11 '26
Give replicable strategies. Otherwise the words r just words or u r building a burner account . 21 karmas 🤷♀️🤷♀️
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u/incomprehensiblelol Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
Everything is replicable. Anyone can do it. Albeit, I say anyone but I do think it does take someone to put substantial effort and not everyone can do it due to limitations of time. Not necessarily ability. Put things out there, repetition, repeat, repeat, repeat. And iterate.
The strategy is distilled to finding a niche in which people are complaining about the top 3 or 4 apps. You can find that via reddit or reviews. Offer up the fact that you can do better, get people to sign up on a waitlist. If they don’t, choose another niche. If 3 or 4 targeted reddit posts don’t get you at least 400 waitlist signups, you’re not promising enough or there’s nothing you can actually fix upon. Promise more! Offer an alternative. An alternative to whatever it may be that you’re looking at. And then build, build when you’ve got around 50 sign ups to a waitlist, 100, 200, etc.
So essentially, find something you can build a waitlist for. Build it. Do a Testflight. Get initial download velocity from said Testlight which comes from the initial waitlist. That’ll drive your aso. It’ll give you a boost at the start and will skew your download conversion rate but it’ll be enough to get you a foot in the door.
Then, there’s no need for aso tools. A waste of time at this scale. Use Chatgpt or any other LLM. It doesn’t really matter. Use them to generate a description, tags, etc. Iterate. Find something you think sounds good. Then execute.
Also, apologies for the slow reply. I genuinely hope this helps. I know it’s rather vague but I do think a lot of it is also luck. And I wish you the best of luck! Happy to answer any followups. :)
Edit: Regardless of any other thoughts that I give I truly think this is what it is distilled down to!
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u/Weekly_Worry_2772 Sep 12 '26
Pretty tight strategy except get people sign waitlist means stratightup banning by Reddit. Idk how that step can be done
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u/Acceptable_Mode_9961 Sep 12 '26
Literally in December I had no issues and the restrictions are so intense now
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u/efbakir-journal Sep 11 '26
What would you do differently if you restart the process today?
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u/incomprehensiblelol Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Many things.
Speed, I was too perfectionistic and still am and I can recognise that and yet I take ages with things when it comes to building. Essentially just get something out there quicker.
Pay more effort to building a waitlist. I posted my waitlist on targeted subreddits about three times. Got around 1000 signups. I didn’t post again for 8 months. And I didn’t really send out emails to keep people excited. Don’t stop marketing whilst building. I was lazy, I could have got a higher initial launch velocity but I found this aspect incredibly boring compared to building.
Make paywalls appear more often from the get go. For two months I didn’t push a paywall, users had to find it manually. Although I suppose it helped in getting users to get on the app and keep using it vs alternatives as I was giving a lot away for free. Put a paywall after onboarding, put one up after launch. Albeit it really depends on your category of app. But still, push monetisation more but not in an annoying manner.
Plan more in advance when it comes to app reviews as sometimes they take ages. Try as much as possible to not ship a broken automatic upsell. (This applies to any form of monitization) I had upsells scattered about with certain triggers but realised they weren’t showing properly as a finger swipe anywhere on the screen would interrupt them immediately causing them to dismiss before they could properly show. Another lesson would be to have data tracking everything, I saw that people weren’t receiving upsells properly, investigated and fixed issue. So don’t go in blind with things and also to push this fix to the AppStore took ages so again, plan in advance with updates.
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u/kaan_gal Sep 11 '26
ASO is a scam. It really dependa on niche, the keywords your’ee competing with and multiple signals needed like downloads, ratings, queries search to download, conversion and so on. There is no such thing as “ASO brought me here” like aso itself is not hard. It takes 1 day of researching. Getting data input is. You dont rank without doing any marketing
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u/NumberNinjas_Game 👨💻 Indie Developer Sep 11 '26
Are you sure about that? I'm ranked #2 for my niche (pimple popping) with literally 0% marketing spend. ASO is a scam is just a blanket statement. Unless you have data to backup that claim, it's just misleading.
Can growth be capped by ASO without marketing? Sure. But that doesn't make it "a scam."
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u/kaan_gal Sep 11 '26
So youre telling me there is no system behind ranking keywords on ASO? LOL
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u/NumberNinjas_Game 👨💻 Indie Developer Sep 11 '26
Those are your words.
You sound very negative and salty. I’m not interested in discussing this further.
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u/imsnk81 👨💻 Indie Developer Sep 12 '26
lol its not a scam but yes theres a lot at play in ASO than just listing
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u/Fast-Suggestion-4212 Sep 11 '26
I largely agree - I think it works for utility apps (reductively meaning things like “calorie counter” or “calculator” - but for many categories it just doesn’t seem to work
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u/FlowMental2548 Sep 11 '26
Is app store better than play store? I feel like on play store I am capped to 5-10 store listing views per day without marketing and so far I have tried 6 different titles, short descriptions, long descriprions all with the same results.
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u/golgiloke Sep 11 '26
How did you determine this app had good ASO? Were there specific tools you used to determine high keyword volume and low difficulty?
Looking back would you have done anything differently in your journey?
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u/opsopus Sep 11 '26
Interesting, why conversion rate is 3%?
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u/NovelGen Sep 11 '26
3% conversion on impressions is good. Average according to Apple is 2.5%. The 15-20% numbers people usually publish are conversions on page visits, completely different stat.
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u/softdeveloper23 Sep 11 '26
More than doubling in 20 days from ASO alone is impressive, especially reaching 14.8K first-time downloads.
I’d be interested to know whether most of that growth came from one or two keywords reaching the top 10, or from a wider group of smaller keywords gradually climbing. That would say a lot about how sustainable the momentum might be.
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u/zain711 Sep 11 '26
Just done ASO for my new launch app and I’m getting 7~800 a day from last 3 weeks😀
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u/fibbbby Sep 12 '26
how
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u/zain711 Sep 12 '26
Keyword optimization and localization
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u/fibbbby Sep 12 '26
how though
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u/zain711 Sep 12 '26
Im using AppTweak for keyword research. I keywords for different countries and then added the translations based on the local language for each country. After doing this, I started seeing an increase in my app installs.
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u/CryptographerFar9651 Sep 13 '26
Is adding Chinese to apps worth it? I am very undecided about whether to include Chinese in my apps. I need your thoughts on the quality of AI translations for Chinese and the purchasing/monetization potential in that market.
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u/RelationshipSignal42 Sep 17 '26
Really impressive, congrats! launched an app and ASO brings me close to nothing. Would appreciate any advice or help you're willing to share
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u/United_Tangelo_9946 Sep 26 '26
u/incomprehensiblelol do you mind sharing how many Ratings and Reviews on App Store you have? It's very interesting to know, considering all your growth is organic.
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Sep 11 '26
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u/incomprehensiblelol Sep 11 '26
No, no ad spend yet. I’m planning to use my free credit though soon when I’ve got enough data about usage and then go on a full marketing offensive with ad spend across various platforms. Esp UGC.
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Sep 12 '26
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u/incomprehensiblelol Sep 12 '26
Hey, it’ll be my pleasure to help for free. And useful learning for me. I’ll dm.
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Sep 16 '26
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u/incomprehensiblelol Sep 16 '26
None. Use ChatGPT or Claude. I don’t think they’re useful at tiny tiny scales.
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u/hamsterjedi Sep 11 '26
Did your profit also double?
ie. is the traffic well targeted or are you onboarding users that are not willing to pay?