4 days in: 10 downloads, $5 in revenue, and the LLM I couldn't fit in an iOS Share Extension

Hey IH, I'm Moa, indie iOS dev from Liechtenstein. Just launched my first genuinely commercial iOS app (previous ones were learning projects I'm not counting hahaha). Sharing day-4 numbers and what I've learned so far.

The product: RecipeInbox, a privacy-first recipe organizer. Save recipes from any iOS app, parsed into structured ingredients/steps, stored locally with CloudKit sync (no third-party backend). One-time USD 2.99 IAP. No subscription.

Day 4 numbers:

- 24 total downloads (10 new + 14 redownloads from people who tested earlier versions)

- 220 impressions, 54 product page views, 18.8% conversion to download

- 2 paying customers, $5 revenue

- 4.17% download-to-purchase rate on day 1

Honest takeaway: conversion at the product page is actually decent (18.8%). The real problem is top-of-funnel with only 220 impressions in 4 days. So the listing works fine; nobody's finding the listing in the first place. That's the wall I'm hitting now.The technical bit some of you might find interesting: I originally wanted to parse recipes with an on-device SLM in the Share Extension. Spent multiple weekends on it. iOS Share Extensions have a ~30MB memory ceiling and even heavily quantized small models are 4-5x that. Ended up shipping with heuristic parsing (JSON-LD where available, DOM heuristics as fallback) which catches ~85% of recipe sites cleanly and runs comfortably under the memory budget. Less impressive than "LLM does it all" but it actually functions and most importantly it serves the core functionality: organizing recipes.

The other lesson: I have a pattern of building before validating. I have three other apps live with combined revenue under $10 across all of them. RecipeInbox already outperformed them in 4 days. Big takeaway is going to be less "build the next thing" and more "figure out distribution for the thing I already built."

Question for the community: for indie iOS apps in 2026, where do you find your first 100 paying customers? Press has gotten harder, social is noisy, ASO competitive. Curious what's actually working for people who've gone from 0 to first traction recently.

App: https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/recipeinbox-rezept-speicher/id6766694174