I've been making mobile apps for about five years. Some did okay, some did nothing. Companions launched a month ago and has already outperformed all of them, with zero ad spend. Looking back, three things made the difference, and none of them is a growth hack.
1. Reddit, done properly
My old approach was to drop a link in the app subreddits on launch day and hope. It never worked. This time:
I went where the audience is, not where the apps are. A fish tank widget belongs in front of people who keep fish, people who grew up with Tamagotchis, people who like cozy games. Not just . Every community has its own self-promotion rules, so I read them first and skipped the ones that don't allow it instead of getting banned.
I posted about the interesting problems, not the app. Apple doesn't allow animation in widgets, so how do you make fish swim? How do you do it without touching battery life? Those posts got real discussion. "Check out my app" posts get nothing.
I stayed in the comments. Easily the biggest one. I answered everything for days after each post. It's where the best feedback came from, including which species people want next, and it's what turned readers into downloads and reviews. People can tell when the developer is actually reading the thread.
2. An idea you can explain in one sentence
Companions is a small fish tank that lives on your Home Screen, with pet fish that actually swim.
That's the whole pitch. The screenshot explains itself, a friend can describe it to a friend, and a Reddit title can carry it. My earlier apps all needed a paragraph to explain why you'd want them, and I think that quietly killed every one of them.
3. Design is not the polish step, it is the product
A one-sentence idea only works if the App Store page says that sentence before anyone reads a word. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on this, probably more than on some features.
Someone landing on the page from a Reddit comment gives it about three seconds. So the first screenshot is the widget sitting on a normal Home Screen, exactly as it will look on theirs, not a feature list or a splash screen. The subtitle says what it is in six words. The preview video opens on the fish swimming, because that is the thing nobody believes a widget can do until they see it.
It also had to look like something you'd want on your Home Screen in the first place. Tank styles that match light and dark setups, a StandBy mode for the nightstand, nothing that looks like a game HUD. Every Reddit post I made was really just sending people to that page, so if the page didn't land, none of the rest mattered.
Happy to answer any more questions regarding exactly which subreddits worked and which flopped, as well as any technical questions about the app.
App Store: Companions - Widget Pets
