No budget, a few hours a week
Marketing for apps
What actually gets an independent app used after launch week: store search, retention, the communities where your users already are, and what to ignore.
List your appFree · Permanent · Do-follow link
Most advice about marketing an app is written for teams with a budget, and it does not survive contact with one person shipping something in evenings. The version that does is mostly three things — the store listing, retention, and being present where your users already are — and everything else is a distant fourth. Store search is the largest of the three and the one treated as paperwork: most installs of most independent apps come from somebody typing into the store, which makes the listing a channel rather than a formality.
The three that matter
In order, and the fourth thing is a long way behind them.
The store listing
The only thing the store's own search can read, and the page every single install goes through.
Retention
Both stores rank on engagement, so an app people keep using gets shown to more people. It is a distribution number wearing a product hat.
Being where the problem is
Two or three places where people already discuss the thing your app is about. Slow, and the highest-converting channel most independent apps have.
A realistic weekly rhythm
Two or three hours, spent like this, repeated for three months before you judge it.
One hour in the communities
Answering things. Not posting about the app — answering the questions people are already asking about the problem it solves.
One hour on the listing or the landing page
Screenshots, the title, the description, the one sentence at the top of your own site. This is the hour that compounds.
Whatever is left on one permanent thing
A single directory submission, or one update to the store screenshots. One, not twenty in an afternoon.
The three channels, in detail
What each one actually asks of you, and the specifics that get skipped.
Store search is your biggest channel, and it is free
Most installs of most independent apps come from somebody searching in the store. That makes the listing a marketing channel rather than a formality.
- Put the search term in the title, not only your brand. Thirty characters on the App Store, fifty on Play, and those words carry more weight than anything else on the page.
- The App Store keyword field is separate from everything users see: a hundred characters, comma separated, no spaces, no repeats of words already in your title. On Play there is no keyword field — the description is indexed instead, so it has to read naturally and contain the words people type.
- Screenshots decide the install, not the description. People look at two and leave. Caption them, and lead with what the app does rather than a sign-up screen.
- Ratings are ranking input. Ask inside the app, at the moment somebody completes something rather than at launch.
- Localise the listing before you localise the app. Translating the store page is an afternoon and opens store search in that language; translating the app is a project.
Then check what happened. Both stores report which search terms brought installs, and that report is the only honest source of what people call the thing you built.
Retention is a marketing channel
This sounds like a product concern and it is a distribution one. Both stores rank on engagement, so an app people keep using gets shown to more people. An app with good day-7 retention and no marketing usually beats an app with bad retention and a launch campaign. Fix the first session before spending an hour on anything else: no sign-up wall before the app has done something useful once, an obvious first action, and no empty state that requires setup to be interesting.
Be present where the problem is discussed
Not where founders are. Where your users are, doing the thing your app is about. This is slow, and it is the highest-converting channel most independent apps have, because the people are pre-qualified and the recommendation reads as a person rather than an ad.
- Find the two or three places — a subreddit, a Discord, a forum, a Facebook group, a hashtag — where people discuss the activity your app serves.
- Read for a week. Answer questions without linking anything.
- Then mention the app when it is a genuine answer to a specific question.
The things worth doing once, that keep working
An afternoon each, and none of them expires the way a post does.
A landing page that is not the store
Something search can index, links can point at, and a person on a laptop can read.
Directory and listing sites
Ten minutes each, permanent, and they accumulate. There is a list worth working through, and an order to do it in.
A short demo video
One take, thirty seconds, no music, showing the thing working. It goes on the landing page, in the store listing, and in every post.
Make your site readable by assistants
"What app should I use for X" is increasingly asked of a model rather than typed into a search box, and the answer comes from what those models can read. A page that says plainly what the app does, in text rather than in an image, is most of the work. The checker will tell you what one sees in a few seconds.
Where this site fits
One of the permanent listings above, named so you can judge it against them.
A page for your app, and a link that passes
WhatAreYouBuilding.AI is a free, worldwide directory of what independent builders are shipping: AI, SaaS and dev tools, by country, category and funding stage. The listing is a page of its own with a regular do-follow link to your site, organised by those axes rather than by launch date. Every submission is reviewed before it appears, and listing is free.
Queryable by agents
Which is the part that matters for the assistant question above: the catalogue answers over an MCP server and a plain JSON API, so an app listed here is readable by the things people increasingly ask instead of searching.
What to ignore, and the questions behind it
Four things that look like marketing and are not, and the one number to watch.
Should I buy installs?
Not unless you know your revenue per user. Bought installs are the worst-retaining users available, and retention is what the ranking uses — so the cheap version of this actively costs you ranking.
Are press releases and paid "featured on" placements worth it?
Nobody reads them and the links are usually marked nofollow, which means they pass no ranking signal either. There is a two-minute check for that, and it is worth running before you pay anybody.
Can I post the same launch announcement across ten platforms?
You can, and it reads as what it is.
Marketing did not work. Should I rebuild the app?
Check retention first. If people who arrive keep using it, the problem is distribution; if they do not, no amount of distribution helps. Rebuilding before you know which one you have is the expensive way to find out.
How long before any of this works?
The compounding is real and it is slow. Three months of two or three hours a week before the question is answerable at all, and the most common failure is stopping at week six.
What is the one number to watch?
Day-1 and day-7 retention, until they are good. Every other number is downstream of those two, including the ranking that decides how many people ever see the app.
The pages this one points at
The list of places to be listed, and the two checks worth running first.
List your app where it keeps being found
A permanent page, a do-follow link, and no launch day to prepare for.