Dear solopreneurs, what have you found to be the best way to market your app?

I self promoted 🤪

for me what works best so far is posting in facebook groups where my potentials customers could be. it really depends on your product, just reverse engineer it and try to figure out where these people are, is it LinkedIn, Reddit or myabe X.

I really hope your app trades better than it spits out copy bc you're missing a couple s' on your page

The opportunities around how you market your app will greatly depend on your product and audience. For me, my people (early stage indie founders and solopreneurs) live on X and Reddit. So for me, building credibility was crucial, and my 9+ yr engineering background is relatively not very impressive. So the first thing I did was to get a sponsor from a big name and i did that by winning a hackathon they were hosting. Second, I challenged a YC-backed company to a public build battle which i ended up productizing.

Could you share that long blog post you mentioned

I just did case studies and comparisons and benchmarking tests of other related products. All objective. Was naturally curious to see how they compared so it was actually initially just out of curiosity more than seo or profit. Spent a few days researching before each. Compiled a large blog AI assisted but manually edited by me. A few months later I have min 15 k visitors daily from both organic google search and AI recommendations (all free, and mostly high intent purchase visitors). Because of the marketing site (blog) my app now makes about $800 a day, with some days reaching over double that. Never spent a dime on any marketing, paid ads, social or email. I'll proly set 20% of that and do an aggressive marketing campaign in all those channels at some point. The app UI was vibe coded but the engine running under it was manually code spot checked and edited everywhere in terms of ux, security, payment management, db, auth and everything in between, by me, for well over a year before I launched it. Again, wasnt thinking much about profit and wanted to see others benefit from the app. Didnt even charge much first few months after launch. So the best way for me was to spend a ton of manual effort making a product I would buy if I found bcus it solves my problem, and to spend then write up data backed comparison posts on related products. Nobody wants to here manual effort these days, but this is what nailed it for me.

I don’t wanna self promote but I built a tool that searches public emails on Instagram for my niche. It tends to be emails that haven’t been abused and generally get decent reply rates.

So far I’ve been trying Facebook groups, Pinterest, Reddit and YouTube. The Facebook groups were terrible, each with around 50k users, posts seemed to get like 3-4 engagements and then get lost in the sea. Speaking of sea, Pinterest is a weird platform, ppl are pumping out pins everyday, so easy to get lost in the mix. YouTube I just made like 5 videos and each got about 5-10 views. Reddit has been the only thing that works for me but it takes sooo long. You have to be genuine and write thoughtful posts and only market your product like 10% of the time. Then you reach out to like 50 ppl and 10 try the product and hopefully 1 is your user. Unless you have an already established social media presence it seems like this is something that takes years of posting multiple times a day just to gain traction. I’ve been making seo pages for a month now, I’m hoping to have 100-200 in a few months once my seo eligibility starts picking up. Then back linking and cross referencing everything is another full time job in itself. Solopreneur life is absolute shiite especially when you already have a family and two jobs.

have about 2,500+ waitlist users at the moment for nvestiq. i made seo/geo focused blogs and i posted on reddit subgroups where my icp was (believe me, they do not play around with self promo😂), post on x, medium, instagram, fb, everywhere. forgot to mention linkedin has been big for me, ex of post: linkedin

Just being a real human in relevant spaces. So many people try to game this shit these days that it really helps to just...hang. Not being eager to chloroform people with your pitch and just being down to help and create value that naturally draws people in. Authenticity reigns supreme imo.

Still figuring it out

I did write a post yesterday about my iPhone farm setup , take a look

Search Google Maps for all of your customers in a 30 minute drive then go knock their doors and talk. I did this for hospitality and it was a game changer. I hate seeing founders spend time trying to optimize website conversions where their customers are literally in line with them at Starbucks and the grocery store.

1% from ads 99% from other channels like social media

I'm solving a very niche industry problem, so I'm almost exclusively using LinkedIn

Ads and human interaction

I devised a plan where by I will be making YouTube videos and shorts. My company is essentially helping consulting companies and change management to track behavioural changes in their transformation projects. Each week, I'll choose a company and go through their public case study then discuss it from the lens of my company. Essentially saying this is how adding my product could be a differentiator. The key is to answer the problem which they didn't have the word for. And then, hopefully if they see the value then they'll come to me.

AEO I built a tool that let you know if your app or site is being mentioned by Chatgpt, perplexity, and more plus a query out fan helper Look up what's a query out fan if you don't know its how Chatgpt find it data to answer questions

talking to users one by one. it doesn't scale but neither does building the wrong product. Every meaningful improvement I've made came from conversations not analytics.

for me referral marketing (on LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Slack communities, etc.) worked, i think it's the best way to get initial customers and once you get some pipeline I think you can also start Paid ads (that too targeted if your ICPs are clear) + UGC, and then you can invest in SEO as well...

I am building apps for touring artists. I am an artist myself so I hope it will be more easy. Djs like me live on Instagram.

By creating short form faceless content for Instagram and tiktok