I'm promoting an all-in-one life app with £0 — here's the honest plan
I'm working on the launch of Nexus Life — an app that puts tasks, habits, goals, notes, and calendar into one calm workspace. Free to start, one login, set up in under 60 seconds.
The budget for this launch: £0. No ads, no paid directory slots, no bought votes. I wanted to see what a genuinely zero-budget launch can do in 2026, and to write it all down — wins, failures, and the arithmetic — here.
I built Nexus Life. Honestly, I couldn't find an app that did what I wanted, so I built it myself. I'd tried things like Todoist and Notion, but they get complicated fast — and then I'm using different apps for different things, and after a while I just stop using all of them. What I wanted was something simple AND all in one. So I built the app I couldn't find.
The plan (and the math)
The north star is weekly activated users, not installs. The funnel model I'm testing:
2,400 qualified visits → 360 installs (15%) → 216 activated (60%) → 86 still around at week four (40%) → ~10 paying (12%).
Every number in that model is an assumption, and I'll correct them in public as real data comes in. If any stage falls below its kill threshold (visit-to-install under 10%, activation under 40%, week-four retention under 25%), the channel gets paused and I'll say so.
The channels I'm working, in order:
- Free app directories — submitted to two so far (AppRater, Launching Next). Others need accounts or hit blockers; I'll work through them.
- Reddit — warming up properly first. No links, no mentions, just useful comments for weeks. Posting the app into a fresh account would be spam and it would deserve the ban.
- Indie Hackers — this post. I'll document the journey here as it happens.
- SEO content — honest comparison guides, not keyword slop. If an article isn't genuinely useful, it doesn't ship.
- Product Hunt — deliberately not now. It's a day-46–60 thing, after there's activation data and a demo worth showing. Launching early with nothing to prove is how you get 12 upvotes and learn nothing.
What I won't do
No bought votes or voting rings. No fake reviews. No "we have 10,000 users" when we don't. If the numbers are small, they're small — small and real beats big and made up.
The numbers so far
Honest answer: basically none yet. The campaign is one day old — the directory listings and social posts went live last night. Zero installs attributed to the campaign so far, and that's the baseline I'm measuring against. I'll post real numbers here as they come in.
Pricing
Nexus Life is free for 30 days, then £4/month or the local equivalent (App Store listing shows £3.99/month and £29.99/year).
What happens next
I'll post updates with real numbers as they come in — what's working, what's dead, what surprised me. First milestone: get the analytics instrumentation right so I actually know what's happening instead of guessing.
If you've done a zero-budget launch, I'd love to hear what your biggest surprise was — good or bad.
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Thanks for sharing the numbers, that makes it much easier to follow.
Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?
Good write-up. What would you do differently if you started again?
This is useful. How are you finding your first users so far?
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Once real users arrive, what behavior will distinguish genuine product pull from initial curiosity—completing multiple workflows in one workspace, returning weekly, or retaining a single core habit?
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Writing the plan down publicly is the right call — the $0 version lives or dies on sequencing, and almost nobody states theirs before running it.
One thing from my own $0 attempt I'd have wanted told to me early: posting volume on community platforms is the tactic that looks cheapest and quietly costs the most. I posted five times in two weeks on here, got one comment in total, and ended up with my account unable to post at all for a couple of days. In the same period, one long comment on someone else's post — the kind where you have to go check your own data before hitting send — turned into a three-round conversation and more useful feedback than all five posts combined. Ninety minutes against roughly ten thousand words. If your plan has a "post consistently" line in it, I'd move most of that budget into commenting.
Second one, cheaper than it sounds: test what language models say when someone asks them to recommend an app in your category. It costs nothing to check, it's a real acquisition surface now, and the thing that actually moves it is having something about you that isn't on your own domain — which is what a $0 plan produces anyway. Worth measuring before you start so you can tell later whether any of it worked.
Small and concrete, since $0 plans usually lean on directories: go read the page source of one of your listings. A fair number carry rel="nofollow", and some get switched after the fact. Took me two weeks of writing before I thought to check.
What's first on your list, and how long are you giving it before you call it?
Love this angle. Building Xstream4K right now so this hits close to home — what made you look into it in the first place?