Breaking through and building out

Building apps can be a highly fulfilling career, it’s creative, ever-changing, and intellectually rewarding. It can also be a great hobby or side hustle, and a great way to create passive income. But being a part-time indie dev can also be incredibly frustrating.

Most indie devs do it because they love it, building apps in their spare time to try out new tech, new OS features or because they’ve had an idea and decided to implement it. But what about when you want to show off what you have created to the world?

So you decide to ship it, release it to the App Store, and nothing happens, you’ll get a few downloads initially from the App Store bump, and then it will dwindle to 3 - 4 downloads a day, maybe if you’re lucky. The issue is that most App Store categories are heavily saturated with thousands of apps, so it begs the question: is it really worth it?

I personally think it all depends on who you are as a person and what your end goal is, and these things do take time if you’re an average person who doesn’t have a huge social media following.

But there are some things you can do to try and increase your downloads…

New Features

Adding new features can be one way to gain downloads; It is hard to know exactly what your users want. Some people might view your app and realise it’s not quite what they’re after, and that’s okay, you can’t always know exactly what users are looking for. One way to mitigate this is to look at your competitors in this category, see what others are doing. It can be challenging, and you do have a bias when you’re the one who has built something; you have a specific idea of how something should work, but try to think outside of the box a little

Social Media

You could attempt to build a social media following and promote your app that way, either for yourself or the app you’ve built. Social media is a beast and can skyrocket downloads if you’re in the right area at the right time.

User Research

Reaching out to users may feel daunting, but you could implement in-app analytics to see what your users are or aren’t using. Telemetry Deck is a great platform for this, and it respects user privacy. If you want to offer up new features to your users and let them select which ones they would like to see next, why not look at something like WishKit.

Building a website

Building a website for your app can be another way of sending traffic to your App Store page, helping raise awareness of its existence. Leveraging good SEO can help with Google search traffic. However, maintaining and hosting a website does come with additional costs. Using a platform such as SquareSpace can get you up and running pretty quickly, but building and hosting it yourself is cheaper, but does come with additional work.

Build in public

Building in public links into the social media aspect of things, it’s kind of what it sounds like; posting on social media about what you’re building, new features, challenges you’re facing, people get to see your progress firsthand, and it can really help to spread awareness about your project. Simply post online using the hashtag #buildinpublic.

So be patient, give it time, keep cracking on, adding new features, slowly improving your product to make it better for your users. My personal disclaimer is that I’m still on my own journey, learning as I go, and I am yet to master the art of marketing.

Hopefully, this will give you some more ideas on how to get your app into the hands of users.

Thanks for stopping by 🙂.