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.

It helps to reframe the goal. You are not trying to “get users.” You are trying to find the specific people who already have the problem you solved, get in front of them, and give them a reason to care. Ten of the right people beat a thousand random visitors who bounce.

Channel 1: be where your users already complain

Find the exact place your target user already hangs out and asks for help. A subreddit, a Discord, a Facebook group, a niche forum, an X hashtag. Then be useful first. Answer questions for a week or two before you ever mention your app.

When you do mention it, frame it as “I built this because I had the same problem,” not “check out my app.” People can smell a pitch instantly, and communities reject it on sight. What they respond to is a fellow sufferer who solved the thing and is sharing what they learned. The link is almost an afterthought to a genuinely helpful post.

This channel does not scale, and that is exactly why it works at this stage. You can afford to talk to people one at a time when you only need a hundred of them.

Channel 2: App Store Optimization (ASO)

If you have a mobile app, the store is a search engine, and free traffic lives there.

• Put your main keyword in the title and subtitle, which carry the most weight.
• Make your first two screenshots sell the benefit, not show a login screen. They are visible without scrolling and they decide the install.
• Ask happy users for ratings at a good moment, after a win inside the app, never on first launch.
• Localize the listing for a couple of big markets. It is cheap and most competitors never bother.

ASO compounds. A listing you optimize once keeps pulling installs for months. The full playbook is in the ASO guide.

Channel 3: build in public

Share the process, not just the product. “Day 12: added offline mode, here is what broke and how I fixed it.” People follow journeys, then become users, then become the people who tell others. It compounds slowly and then suddenly, and the audience you build follows you to your next app too.

Your splash pages help here. A clean page per app that auto-routes to the right store on mobile gives you one link to drop anywhere, in any thread or post, without thinking about which platform someone is on.

Channel 4: content that ranks

Write the article your user would search for before they even know your app exists. “How to do X,” where X is the problem you solve. It pulls in people with exactly the right intent, for years, for free. This blog is doing that right now: each post is a door that someone with the problem can walk through. Content is slow to start and then becomes the channel that quietly works while you sleep.

Channel 5: direct outreach

For your very first users, one-to-one beats one-to-many. Send a polite, specific message to ten people who fit your app perfectly. Ask them to try it and tell you what is confusing. You get users and the feedback that makes the next ninety easier to win. The key word is specific: a copy-pasted blast gets ignored and reported, while a genuine message that references the person’s actual situation gets a reply.

What to measure (and what to ignore)

Vanity metrics will lie to you. At a hundred users, do not obsess over downloads. Watch:

• Activation: what fraction of installs actually reach the “aha” moment, the first real use of the app?
• Retention: do people come back on day two, day seven? This is the single most honest signal of whether you built something worth growing.
• Where they came from: tag your channels loosely so you know which one is actually working, and double down there.

If activation and retention are bad, more traffic just means more people bouncing faster, which can even hurt your store ranking. Fix the leak before you pour in water.

What to skip at this stage

• Paid ads. You do not know your message or your numbers yet, so you would just pay to confirm that.
• Press. Reporters cover traction, not launches. Get the traction first, then the story tells itself.
• Going wide. A thousand strangers who do not fit beat nothing, but a hundred who fit perfectly beat the thousand.

A download is not a user

One caution as you count toward a hundred: a download is not a user. Someone who installs the app, opens it once, and never returns is a vanity number, not a customer, and chasing those will only flatter you while teaching you nothing. When you tally your first hundred, count the people who actually came back and used the thing more than once. That is the number that tells you whether you have something real, and it is the only one worth optimizing for at this stage.

The real unlock

Pick two of these channels and do them consistently for a month, instead of trying all five for three days. Consistency is the actual growth hack, and it is the one almost nobody has the patience for. Your first hundred users come from showing up in the same place, being genuinely useful, and asking, over and over, long after the novelty has worn off. Do that, learn from every conversation, and the second hundred gets easier, because by then you actually understand who your app is for. For the community side specifically, see getting your first users from Reddit and communities.

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.

A rough ratio people throw around is nine to one, nine genuinely helpful, non-promotional contributions for every one time you mention your app. You do not have to count, but the spirit is right. If your first post in a community is your launch, you have already lost, because you have given the group no reason to trust you. Spend time being a good member first, and the promotion later lands on fertile ground instead of hostile ground.

Find the right rooms

Go where the problem lives, not where “marketing” lives.

• Search Reddit for the problem phrases, not your product. If people are asking “best offline transcription app?” in a subreddit, that is your room, and the demand is already proven by the question.
• Smaller, focused communities convert far better than giant generic ones. Two thousand obsessed members beat two million bored ones, because the obsessed ones actually have the problem and actually act.
• Look for Discords and forums built around the hobby or profession your app serves. Those tend to be higher-trust and longer-lived than a single Reddit thread that scrolls away in a day, and relationships there compound over time.

Read the rules before you type a word

Every community has self-promotion rules, and they vary wildly.

• Many subreddits ban links outright, or allow them only in a weekly “self-promo” or “what are you working on” thread. Use those threads. They exist for exactly this, and posting there is welcomed rather than punished.
• Some communities allow promotion only from established members with a minimum account age or karma, which is just another reason to participate before you pitch.
• Mods are not your enemy. Breaking a clearly posted rule is. Skim the sidebar and the wiki first, because a thirty-second read saves you from an instant, permanent ban.

Post a story, not a pitch

When you do share, frame it as a person, not a billboard.

• Lead with the problem and your motivation. “I kept needing to transcribe interviews but did not want to upload private audio to a server, so I built something that runs entirely on the phone.” That is a story people relate to, not an ad they tune out.
• Be useful even to non-users. Explain what you learned, how it works, the trade-offs you made and why. People upvote insight. They scroll past advertising.
• Invite feedback, genuinely. “What would you want it to do?” turns a promotion into a conversation, and it turns your earliest users into co-designers who feel ownership over the thing and tell their friends about it.
• Do not fake it. No sockpuppet accounts, no “has anyone tried this app?” from a burner you control. It always gets caught eventually, and it is the single fastest route to a permanent ban and a trashed reputation.

Use direct messages, sparingly and like a human

For your very first handful of users, a polite, specific, personal message to someone who clearly has the problem can work well, but only if it is genuinely personal. Reference their actual situation, the thing they actually said. Ten thoughtful messages beat a hundred copy-pasted ones, because the templated blast gets ignored and reported while the real one gets a reply, and often the kind of detailed feedback that makes your next ninety users far easier to win.

Turn feedback into momentum

The underrated prize of communities is not just users, it is honest, fast feedback from exactly the people you are building for. Listen for the recurring complaint, the feature three different people ask for, the word people use that you should put in your app store listing. Ship a fix, then go back and tell the community you did it because they asked. That loop, listen, ship, report back, builds a small group of genuine advocates, and advocates are worth more than any single install.

What gets you banned, so you can avoid it

• Drive-by link drops with zero participation in the community.
• Posting the same thing across ten subreddits at once, which reads as spam to both mods and automated filters.
• Arguing with moderators or ignoring clearly posted rules.
• Astroturfing with fake accounts and fake enthusiasm.

Every item on that list screams “marketer,” which is the one thing communities reject on sight. Avoid all of it by simply being the member you would want in the room.

Patience is the actual skill

The hardest part of this approach is not finding communities or writing good posts. It is the patience to participate for weeks before you see a single user, while a part of your brain screams that you should just drop a link and move faster. Resist it. The people who win in communities are the ones who treat them as places they belong, not as channels to exploit, and that orientation is almost impossible to fake over the long run. Show up because you genuinely find the community interesting and useful, and the users become a natural byproduct rather than a transaction you are straining to force. Slow is not the cost of this channel. It is the reason it works.

The payoff

Done right, communities give you something ads never will: your first users, and honest feedback, and a few people who will tell others. It is slow, it is manual, and it does not scale, which is exactly why it works at the stage when nothing else does. You can afford to talk to people one at a time when you only need a hundred of them. Pair it with App Store Optimization and the rest of the no-budget playbook, show up consistently, and be the member you would want to meet.

Start with the keyword, not the cleverness

Before anything, figure out what your users type. Not your branding, not your clever product name, the literal words a real person uses when they want what you built. “Voice to text,” “offline AI,” “capybara game.” Those phrases are your raw material, and getting them right is most of the battle.

Tools help here. App Store Connect shows search popularity, and third-party ASO tools estimate volume and difficulty. But even free thinking gets you most of the way: list every phrase a confused stranger might search to find an app like yours, then rank them by two things, how much traffic they likely have and how well your app actually delivers on that search. You want terms where you can genuinely be one of the best results, not the most competitive term where you will be buried on page ten.

Title and subtitle do the heavy lifting

On the App Store, the title and subtitle are by far the highest-weighted keyword fields. Do not waste them on just your brand name.

• Title: your brand plus your single most important keyword, for example “Private Transcribe: Voice to Text.” That one keyword in the title is worth more than a dozen buried in the description.
• Subtitle: your next strongest keywords in a readable phrase, not a robotic comma salad. It still has to read like a human wrote it.
• iOS keyword field (100 characters): every character counts. No spaces after commas, no repeating words already in your title, no plurals of words you already used. Pack it efficiently.
• Google Play weights the description for keywords instead of a separate field, so write a natural description that uses your important terms a few times without stuffing. Keyword-stuffed descriptions read badly and can get penalized.

The icon gets the click, screenshots make the sale

People decide in about a second, and two assets carry that second.

• Icon. It must read clearly at thumbnail size in a crowded search results list. Simple, high-contrast, and recognizable wins. Test it shrunk down to 60 pixels, and if it turns to mush, redesign it. A clever icon nobody can parse at small size is a failure no matter how nice it looks large.
• The first two screenshots. These are visible without scrolling, and they decide the install more than anything else on the page. Show the benefit, not a login screen or an empty menu. Add a short caption overlay on each one, “Works 100% offline,” “99+ languages,” “No account needed.” Treat your screenshots as an ad, not as documentation.

Ratings and reviews are ranking fuel

Your rating is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor. A 4.7 gets installed, a 3.9 gets skipped, even for the identical app. The trick is when you ask:

• Never prompt on first launch, before the user has any reason to like you.
• Ask after a win, a finished transcription, a new high score, a successful result. That is when goodwill is highest.
• Use the operating system’s native review prompt so people can rate without leaving the app, which dramatically increases how many actually do.
• Reply to reviews, especially the negative ones. It is public, it shows you care, and it lifts overall sentiment for everyone reading later.

Pick the right category and study your competitors

Choosing the most accurate, slightly less crowded category can meaningfully change how discoverable you are. And your competitors have already done expensive testing you can learn from for free. Look at the top apps for your keywords. What is in their titles? What do their first two screenshots emphasize? You are not copying, you are reading the market’s answer key, then doing it a little better and more honestly.

Localize, because it is cheap leverage

Translating your store listing, not necessarily the whole app, into a few large languages unlocks entire markets your competitors ignore. Title, subtitle, keywords, and screenshot captions are usually enough to start. It is one of the highest return on investment afternoons you will ever spend, because most indie developers never bother and you get those searchers nearly uncontested.

Treat ASO as iteration, not a launch task

This is where almost everyone fails. ASO is not “set it and forget it.” Change one variable at a time, a screenshot, the subtitle, the icon, then watch your conversion rate and impressions for a couple of weeks and keep whatever wins. Both stores hand you this data for free, and most developers simply never open the dashboard. The ones who check monthly and adjust pull steadily ahead of the ones who set it once and walk away.

One more cheap win: an app preview

If your store listing allows a short app preview video, add one. Most indie developers skip it, which is exactly why it works: a simple fifteen-second clip showing the app actually in motion can set your listing apart and lift conversion, especially for anything where seeing it move explains the value faster than any screenshot can. It takes an afternoon to record and trim, and it keeps earning installs for as long as the listing is up.

The honest caveat

ASO amplifies a good app. It cannot save a bad one. If people install and immediately churn, that actually hurts your ranking, because the stores watch retention. So ASO works hand in hand with the product itself and with your other channels. It is the store-side complement to getting your first users from communities and the broader playbook in getting your first 100 users with no budget.

Do the keyword homework, nail the title and first two screenshots, earn ratings at the right moment, localize the listing, and revisit it monthly. That is most of ASO, and it is the rare kind of traffic you do real work for once and then keep getting paid on long after.

Why app developers should care about web SEO

The app stores are walled gardens. You optimize your listing, which matters and which I covered in the ASO guide, but you only reach people already browsing the store for something like your app. Web search reaches everyone else: the person googling “how to transcribe audio privately” who has not yet thought to look in an app store at all. Catch them at the moment they are describing their problem, and you can introduce your app as the answer. That is a much larger and warmer pool than store search alone.

Start with a simple website

You need a home on the open web that you control, not just a store listing. It does not have to be complicated. A fast static site with a page for the app, a privacy policy, and a blog is plenty. Static site generators make this cheap and low-maintenance, and you can host it free. This site you are reading is exactly that setup. The website does triple duty: it ranks in search, it hosts the privacy policy both stores require, and it gives you a stable link to send people that is not at the mercy of store algorithms.

Write the content your users search for

The heart of web SEO is publishing content that answers what your potential users are typing into Google. Think about the questions someone has before they know your app exists:

• The problem, framed as a question: “how to do X,” “best way to Y,” “X without Z.”
• Comparisons people make while deciding: “A vs B,” “alternatives to C.”
• The how-to guides around your app’s domain, written genuinely to help.

Each article is a doorway. Someone searches their problem, finds your helpful guide, and at the end discovers that you built an app that solves exactly that. You are not interrupting them with an ad, you are answering the question they already asked, which is the most welcome kind of marketing there is.

Do the basics right, ignore the rest

SEO has a reputation for being a dark art, but for an indie developer the fundamentals carry almost all the weight, and the advanced stuff rarely matters at your scale. The basics:

• Useful, original content that genuinely answers the search. This is most of SEO. Google is in the business of surfacing helpful pages, so be one.
• A clear title and description for each page that matches what people search.
• Headings and structure so both readers and search engines can follow the page.
• Fast loading and mobile-friendly, which static sites give you almost for free.
• Internal links between related articles, so visitors and crawlers move through your site. (Notice how these posts link to each other. That is this principle in action.)

Skip the obsession over keyword density, meta keyword tags, and a hundred technical tweaks that move nothing. Helpful content that loads fast beats a thousand micro-optimizations.

Be patient, because this compounds

The hard truth about SEO is that it is slow. A new article can take weeks or months to rank, and a new site has little authority at first. This is exactly why most people quit, and exactly why it works for those who do not. Every article you publish is a permanent asset that keeps pulling visitors long after you wrote it, with no ongoing cost. Ten articles in, you have a modest trickle. A year of consistent publishing in, you have a real, free, compounding channel that works while you sleep. The traffic curve is flat and then it bends upward, and the only way to get to the bend is to keep going through the flat part.

Let it serve the whole portfolio

A nice property of a content site is that it is not tied to one app. The audience and authority you build serve everything you make, now and later. A reader who found your guide and trusted it is a warm lead for your next app too. This is part of why a portfolio approach and a content habit pair so well, a theme I get into in why I build small apps. Your writing becomes a durable asset that outlives any single product.

Avoid the common traps

A few mistakes waste indie developers’ time and occasionally do real harm. The first is writing for search engines instead of people, stuffing keywords until the prose reads like a robot wrote it, which both repels readers and, increasingly, gets penalized. Write for a human first, always. The second is chasing the most competitive keywords, where established sites have years of authority you cannot match yet, instead of the specific long-tail questions where you can genuinely be the best answer. The third is expecting results in weeks and quitting when they do not come, right before the compounding would have started. And the fourth is publishing an article and never touching it again, when a quick refresh of a useful post every so often keeps it ranking. Avoid those, focus on genuinely helpful writing aimed at real questions, and the basics will carry you further than any clever trick.

The takeaway

The app store is one search box. The open web is a much bigger one, full of people describing their problem in their own words, moments before they go looking for a solution. Build a simple website, publish genuinely helpful content around the problems your apps solve, get the basics right, link your articles together, and then be patient enough to let it compound. It is the slowest marketing channel to start and one of the most durable once it does, and for a solo builder playing a long game, that trade is well worth making.

Why it works

People do not connect with polished launches. They connect with stories and with people, and a build-in-public journey gives them both. When you share the real process, the small wins, the frustrating bugs, the lesson you learned the hard way, you become a person someone is following rather than a faceless app. That relationship is the foundation of everything that follows.

The mechanics are simple and compounding. People follow your journey, some become users, some become the people who tell others, and crucially, the audience you build is not tied to one app. It follows you to the next one. You are not just marketing a product, you are building a standing audience that makes every future launch easier. That is the opposite of paid ads, which stop the instant you stop paying.

What to actually share

The most common worry is “I have nothing interesting to share.” You have more than you think. The material is your actual work:

• Progress. “Added offline mode today, here is what it looks like.” Simple, and it shows momentum.
• Decisions and trade-offs. Why you chose one approach over another. People love seeing the reasoning, not just the result.
• Problems and how you solved them. The bug that took a day, the thing that broke in production. Struggles are relatable and useful, and they make the wins land harder.
• Numbers, if you are comfortable. Downloads, users, revenue. Real numbers are magnetic because so few people share them honestly, and they build enormous credibility.
• Lessons. What you would do differently, what surprised you. This is genuinely useful to others walking the same path, which is the whole spirit of articles like these.

You do not have to share everything, and you should not share what makes you anxious. But the ordinary reality of building, told honestly, is far more interesting to people than you expect.

Be honest, especially about the failures

The instinct is to share only the wins and hide the struggles, but that is exactly backwards. The failures are what make you trustworthy and relatable. Everyone posts their launches. Almost no one posts the app that flopped, the feature nobody used, the month with no growth. When you share those honestly, you stand out, and you give people a reason to believe your wins are real too. Polished, relentlessly positive feeds read as marketing. Honest ones read as a person, and people follow people.

Where to do it

Pick the platform where your kind of people already gather and where you will actually keep posting. For many indie developers that is a public feed on a social platform, a community like the right subreddit or Discord, or a blog like this one where each post is also a durable, searchable asset. The blog has a particular advantage: unlike a social post that scrolls away in a day, an article keeps working for years and feeds your SEO at the same time. Many builders do both, short updates on social to build relationships, longer posts on a blog to build a lasting record.

Consistency beats virality

Do not wait for the perfect post or chase a viral moment. Building in public works through steady, repeated presence, not one big hit. Showing up regularly with small, honest updates builds an audience far more reliably than occasionally posting something you agonized over. Lower the bar for what is worth sharing, post consistently, and let it accumulate. The person who posts a modest update three times a week for a year will have built something real, while the one waiting to go viral will still be waiting.

Starting from zero

The hardest part is the beginning, when you are posting into apparent silence with no audience. Everyone starts there, and the only way through is to keep going while the audience is still tiny. Engage genuinely with others doing the same thing, support their journeys, and be a real member of the community rather than a broadcaster. Early on, your reach is small but your relationships are strong, and those early followers are often your most loyal users and loudest advocates later. Treat the silent early days as planting, not failing. The audience compounds, slowly and then quickly, the same way getting your first users does.

A few mistakes to avoid

Building in public has failure modes worth naming. The first is performing instead of sharing, turning every post into a humblebrag or a growth-hack thread that reads as fake, which repels the exact trust you are trying to build. The second is comparing numbers competitively and getting demoralized when someone else’s chart looks better, when their context is nothing like yours. The third is letting the audience steer your product, building what gets likes instead of what users need, because applause and usage are not the same thing. And the fourth is quitting during the silent early stretch, right before it starts to compound. Avoid those four, keep it honest and consistent, and the rest mostly takes care of itself.

The takeaway

Building in public turns solo building from a silent grind into a story people can follow and a relationship they can invest in. Share your real progress, decisions, problems, and lessons, be honest especially about the failures, pick a platform you will stick with, and post consistently rather than waiting for perfection. Start before you have an audience, because everyone does, and let it compound. Done sincerely over time, it becomes a standing audience that makes every app you ship easier to launch than the last, which is exactly the kind of compounding advantage a solo builder needs.