Marketing

The hardest users to get are the first hundred. Paid ads are the worst way to get them, because you will burn money learning lessons you could have learned for free. Here is what actually works when your budget is zero and it is just you. Start with the brutal truth Nobody is waiting for your app. No one will find it by accident. Distribution is your job, and it is a bigger job than building. If that sounds unfair, it is also the opportunity: most builders quit at exactly this point, so simply showing up consistently is itself an edge. The first hundred users do not come from a clever hack. They come from doing unglamorous things repeatedly, long after most people would have given up. ...

Reddit, Discord, niche forums, and Facebook groups are where your first hundred users are sitting right now, talking about the exact problem you solved. They are also where self-promoters get downvoted into oblivion and banned within the hour. The difference between those two outcomes is entirely about how you show up, and once you understand the psychology of a community, it is not even hard. The one rule that governs everything Contribute before you promote. Communities can instantly smell someone who showed up only to advertise. The mental model that works: you are a member who happens to have built something useful, not a marketer who joined to drop a link. That distinction is everything, and people detect it faster than you would believe. ...

Most indie developers treat the app store like a filing cabinet, somewhere to park the app once it is done. It is not. It is a search engine with hundreds of millions of people typing in exactly what they want, and App Store Optimization (ASO) is how you show up for them. It is the closest thing to free, compounding distribution a solo developer has, and unlike paid ads, the work you do once keeps paying out for months. Here is how to actually do it. ...

Most indie developers think about the app store search box and stop there. But people search the wider web constantly, and that traffic is enormous, intent-rich, and free. A bit of search engine optimization, paired with a simple website, can quietly funnel the right users to your app for years. It is slow to start and it compounds, which makes it one of the best long-term investments a solo builder can make. Here is how to approach it without it becoming a second full-time job. ...

Building in public means sharing your journey as you go, the progress, the decisions, the numbers, the failures, instead of working in silence and unveiling a finished product. For an indie developer with no marketing budget, it is one of the most powerful and underused growth strategies there is. It turns the lonely work of solo building into something people can follow, root for, and eventually buy. Here is how to do it well, and how to start even when no one is watching yet. ...