700 downloads and stuck — five months later...
Five months ago I posted here about being stuck. The numbers were: 700 downloads, ~20 paying users, $150 total revenue. The feeling was worse than the numbers — that classic solo loop where you need users to know what to build, features to attract users, and marketing time you don't have because you're building features. About thirty of you answered, and I've reread those comments more times than I'll admit. They've been the co-founder I don't have.
Why I kept building anyway
The most common advice in that thread was blunt: stop building, start selling. You already have something worth marketing.
I half-listened — and I want to explain the half I ignored, because it was a real decision, not procrastination-by-coding.
SelfOS was never meant to be another to-do list. I started it for myself, and the idea from day one was bigger: one calm place for your whole life — what you need to do, what you're trying to become, and how you actually feel while doing it. The line in my Instagram bio says it best: for the days you're thriving, and the days you're just surviving. Tasks and habits were only half of that vision. When my little marketing spikes worked and people arrived, they were landing on half an app.
And there was a pettier reason, which I suspect some of you will recognize. To live my own vision I'd have to subscribe to a calorie counter, a water reminder, a sleep tracker — three more subscriptions on top of the planner I'd already built to avoid other subscriptions. At some point I looked at the price of a popular calorie-counting app and thought: absolutely not. I'll build my own. So I did :)
What shipped: SelfOS 2.0, the health update
It went live on August 5. Water, nutrition (with a barcode scanner), sleep and activity joined tasks, goals, habits and shopping lists — 8 modules total now, and every single one is optional. You turn on what you need; the app is exactly as big as you want it to be. Someone who only tracks water and someone running their entire life in it are both using SelfOS "correctly."
The emotional core stayed the same: the bonsai. It's a little tree that grows with your streak — and after 2.0 it grows from everything: a glass of water and a completed task feed the same living thing. 60 achievements shipped along with it, plus full statistics and data export — you can pull every byte of your data out anytime. Everything lives on your phone: no account, no ads.
The other big move was invisible in the changelog: a new name and a new category. SelfOS: Self-Care Tracker (App Store / Google Play) now lives in Health & Fitness instead of the planner shelf.
Then something new happened: users started writing to me
I didn't expect this part. After 2.0 went live, emails began arriving. People praising the app. People reporting bugs — politely, with screenshots! People suggesting features. My favorite review so far: "Replaced 3 different apps with this one."
If you've never shipped solo: strangers taking time to write to you about your app is rocket fuel of a purity you can't buy. One request kept repeating in different words — "let my phone's calendar feed my day." So 2.0.1 shipped just ten days after 2.0, with calendar import: events from your phone's calendar become daily tasks, and your edits always win over the sync. It's the fastest feature turnaround I've ever done, and it exists purely because someone asked.
The selling half
Through all these months I kept showing up on socials — Threads, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok. Threads is where I actually live: a few advice-style comments a day in the niches where my users already talk. Not "check out my app" — just being a useful person in rooms where planners and self-care apps get discussed. It costs $0 and ten minutes a day, and it has produced every single growth spike this app has ever had. And one of those little daily comments recently set off a wave big enough that it deserves its own post — coming soon.
An honest confession though: reels and video are brutally hard for me. Some people talk to a camera like it's a friend; I talk to it like it's a tax inspector. I've decided to stop fighting that and build around it instead — the app now has bonsai share cards, so my users can post their trees to their stories even if I can't post mine 😄 We'll see if the bet pays off.
Questions for you
- The big one: how do you actually market a multi-functional app? Users love all-in-one — but only after install. Selling it is another story: every keyword, every screenshot, every comment forces me to pick ONE pain to lead with, and the stores think in single-purpose shelves. Renaming to "Self-Care Tracker" was me picking a door — but the house behind it is much bigger. Do you sell one module as the door and let the rest be the surprise? Rotate doors seasonally? Is all-in-one an indie superpower (retention, LTV, no direct competitor on the full bundle) — or a structural trap where you can never win any single shelf?
- Instagram people: has anyone actually grown an app through IG — organically or with paid promotion? I'd love to develop my page (Instagram), it feels like the right shopwindow for a visual app like mine, but I have no idea whether IG promotion actually pays back for a consumer app or whether it's all vanity reach. Real numbers welcome, good or bad.
- And still open from March: if your MRR was flat for months and then finally moved — what moved it?
I'll be back soon with the wave story, and after that with the retention verdict. Thank you for those thirty comments — they steered all of this. 🌱
The “one pain as the door, everything else after install” idea makes a lot of sense for an all-in-one app. I’d be curious to see whether rotating the primary message by user intent works better than trying to explain all 8 modules upfront.
The update is encouraging, but I’d be careful not to let the new emails prove every part of the expansion at once. The key question is whether people who arrive for one module complete a meaningful action and return, or whether the broader feature set simply creates a stronger first impression.
I’ve found it useful to separate demand evidence from distribution evidence: feature requests and repeat use tell you what is valuable; the Threads comments tell you whether the acquisition loop is repeatable. If you track source → first completed module → 7-day return, you’ll know whether to keep expanding the product or double down on the few entry points that actually retain.
the "ran the identical playbook on Reddit and got banned within two weeks, same behavior, different immune system" line is the part I'd want to dig into more than anything else in this thread. I'm doing something close to that same playbook on Reddit right now (answering real questions genuinely, not linking my own thing unless it's directly asked for) and haven't hit a wall yet, but I'm early
was it the frequency that got flagged, mentioning your product by name too often, or just Reddit's stricter new-account/spam detection catching normal behavior that looked automated from the outside? trying to figure out if there's a version of this that's sustainable there long-term or if Threads just has structurally more tolerance for it
The shift from 700 downloads/$150 to users actively writing in after 2.0 is a meaningful change in the signal. The multi-functional positioning question becomes especially interesting at this stage.
Thank you - "a meaningful change in the signal" is exactly what it feels like from the inside. Installs can be bought; emails can't.
That’s the important distinction. The emails are a much stronger signal because someone had to care enough to initiate contact. Curious what those users are actually asking for now that they’re reaching out.
The email that started the calendar import tells it better than any roadmap. A few days after 2.0 launched, a medical student from Ukraine wrote to me - sixth year, working three jobs alongside university, her parents living in a border town that's been under shelling for years. She found the app on a morning walk home from a bomb shelter, and asked two things: could SelfOS pull tasks from her calendar, and was there any way to afford it on a student stipend.
Calendar import shipped ten days later - her request went straight into 2.0.1. And she got a lifetime code from me, free; some emails you don't answer with a pricing table.
I'll be honest about why this one matters so much to me: I'm Ukrainian too. I know what it's like to live through war and try to gather your thoughts after a sleepless night. That my app can be one calm place for someone carrying all of that - that's deeply valuable to me.
The other emails are smaller but just as useful: one user has sent me three UI bugs with careful screenshots (all fixed in 2.0.1), another asked for recurring tasks — "don't make me retype 'take out the trash' every Tuesday" - now on the roadmap. This inbox has quietly become my product team.
That’s a much more meaningful signal than the install numbers. I’d be interested in continuing the conversation beyond the thread — what’s the best email to reach you at?
That loop — you need users to know what to build, features to get users, and no time to tell anyone while you're building — yeah that's familiar. The feeling being heavier than the numbers tracks.The part about rereading the old comments hit me. When you're building alone that kind of becomes the cofounder.
The loop you described is real, but I would break it on distribution, not features. 700 downloads is enough to ask the people who paid one question: which job made them pay, and which job made the rest bounce. Ship nothing new until that answer is written down. Then talk about that one job in one place for a month. New features without a named job usually look like motion.
Great point and very relatable! When growth stalls around the initial milestone, shifting focus from raw downloads to community engagement or syndicating content across developer platforms usually helps break the plateau. Keep experimenting with your distribution channels!
man i know nothing about apps lol. but your grind is inspiring. 700 downloads is dope. business is all about staying consistent and not quitting. you got this, keep going.
700 downloads in 5 months isn't nothing — that's real people finding it. What have you tried so far for distribution? Sometimes the bottleneck isn't the product but just not getting enough eyes on it yet.
Pick one door and don't rotate it. Every multi-tool company that markets breadth instead of a single wedge struggles to get anyone to remember what they actually do, ours included in the early days of SocialPost.ai. Lead with Self-Care Tracker, own that shelf completely, and let the other seven modules become the reason people stay once they've already installed for the one thing they searched for.
What I found interesting is that the actual signal didn’t reveal itself in the download number. ~
Having only about 700 downloads may feel disappointing if you are expecting viral growth, but the people writing to you unprompted to ask for features and tell you how they use the app are a very different signal.
I find it useful to keep “people noticed it” and “people care about it” separate. Downloads measure the former. With consistent usage, feedback, and requests for betterment from people, the second begins to manifest.
It clears up the marketing problem a bit more. When you know why the people who care about it are using it, you have something a lot more tangible to build the message around.
The solo loop you describe is brutally real. One thing I have not seen mentioned: have you checked whether technical friction is silently killing your activation funnel?
With 700 downloads and ~20 paying users, your conversion is roughly 3%. That is low even for indie apps. I audit codebases for a living, and a pattern I see frequently is that the onboarding flow, error handling, or performance issues on specific devices silently drop users before they ever reach the aha moment.
Your users are not always going to tell you something is broken. Some will just leave.
If you have not already, I would strongly suggest running a quick technical health check: check your error logs, test the onboarding flow on a slow connection, and look for JavaScript errors in the browser console. Sometimes the thing you are stuck on is not marketing — it is that the product is accidentally broken for a subset of users.
The rename is already the experiment you're asking about, and it shipped confounded. Self-Care Tracker, the category move to Health & Fitness, and eight modules all landed on August 5, so whatever installs do this month, you cannot separate the door from the update.
Cheaper version: leave the name and rotate the screenshots and the first keyword line instead. Those are reversible monthly, and at 700 downloads a flat month is itself a readable result.
Your post half-answers the door question anyway. Every growth spike came from ten minutes of comments a day, not from the shelf. In a comment you pick a different door per room, so the eight modules stop being a positioning problem there.
Your “one door into a much bigger house” point is the interesting part.
I don’t think you need to market the whole product. I’d pick the pain with the strongest existing user signal as the acquisition door, while keeping the broader system as the retention story.
What also stood out to me is the solo-founder loop you described: building, marketing, feedback, prioritization and deciding what to do next all competing for the same person’s attention.
I’ve been working on this exact problem from another angle — not another AI tool, but an operating system for solo founders that helps structure those functions around one founder.
Your post is basically the problem statement I’m researching.
If you could offload one part of that loop tomorrow — marketing, customer research, prioritization, sales or operations — which one would you hand off first?
This hits close to home. I launched a free calculator/tools site 2 months ago (661 pages live, all working, solid technical SEO) and I'm still stuck at near-zero organic traffic. Turns out Google just won't allocate real crawl budget to a brand new domain until it sees external trust signals — backlinks, mentions, real usage. Technical perfection alone doesn't move the needle.
Curious what finally broke the plateau for you — was it one channel, or just compounding small things?
Pick the door by data, not by gut. For a self-care app, retention clusters in one or two daily modules (water/sleep) — measure which feature brings people back and lead with that door; the rest become the surprise. We build AI-native analytics (https://amami.dev) and "which feature actually retains" is the question most founders skip: they count downloads and call it growth.
Agreed in principle, and it's roughly what I'm doing. I'd just split the "door" in two, because they're different decisions.
The acquisition door is the one you mean, and health won it: the app moved to Health & Fitness, and onboarding now builds a personal plan from your body parameters - water, calories, sleep, steps. Health leads, and the productivity half arrives as the surprise.
The door inside the app I deliberately left wide. After onboarding everyone sees all modules, because the cost is asymmetric: removing a module you don't want is one tap, while a module you never switched on is one you'll probably never discover. So people trim the house instead of furnishing it.
On measurement itself: I do see which modules get used, module toggles and per-module events are all tracked. What I don't have yet is an honest link between that and retention, because the traffic wave is two weeks old and the monthly cohort hasn't closed. Usage I can read today; "which module actually brings people back" needs another month before I'd quote it. And I'll have a look at amami.dev - thanks for the pointer!
Congrats on 700 downloads! That’s real traction. A few questions that might help:
Often the next step is doubling down on the channel that brought the first 700.
Thank you! Taking your questions in order.
Conversion from download to active user: honestly, too early for a number I'd trust. The app has only had two weeks of real traffic, so the weekly and monthly windows haven't closed yet, and the denominator right now mixes people who installed before 2.0 with a cold wave that arrived last week. I'd rather wait for the cohort to mature than quote something flattering and meaningless. That's the subject of my next post.
Feedback: yes, and it works better than I expected. There's an in-app rating prompt, and it has brought 27 reviews on Google Play and 24 on the App Store. Separately, people started emailing me directly after 2.0, and those emails have effectively become my product team - one of them turned into a shipped feature in ten days.
Directories: I'm on AlternativeTo, though I still haven't updated the listing for the new version, so that's on me. Product Hunt I keep circling and not committing to. If you've launched a consumer app there, I'd genuinely like to know whether it was worth the day it costs.
And you're right about doubling down: the channel that brought the first 700 is Threads, and that's the one I keep hammering. Everything else has been a distraction so far.
I feel this. I launched my SaaS two weeks ago and I'm already refreshing the dashboard more than I'd like to admit. Downloads without retention is its own kind of pain. What's been the most useful thing you've tried in the last few months — even if it didn't move the number?
I know that dashboard-refreshing far too well!
The most useful thing I did wasn't a feature: it was giving the app an emotional core. A bonsai tree that grows with your streak, so the streak isn't a number in a corner but a living thing you're responsible for. Water, a task, a logged meal all feed the same tree. That's the one change that moved retention rather than installs.
Honest about the size of it though: it retains somewhat better than no tree at all, not dramatically. And I redesigned the bonsai visuals in the latest version, so I'm still waiting on the retention numbers for that one. I'll be able to say something real in about a month.
The "half-listened, not procrastination-by-coding" framing really stuck with me — that's such an honest way to describe following your own instinct even when the crowd's telling you otherwise. Curious how it feels now, five months in — does the 2.0 bet feel like it's paying off, or still too early to tell?
Yes, it paid off, and the clearest sign isn't a number: the product finally feels whole. Before 2.0 people were landing on half an app and I knew it. Now it's the thing I described from day one instead of a promise. (I also stopped paying anyone for a calorie counter, which was a genuinely motivating part of the plan 😄)
The timing is funny too. Right now the app has caught a wave of new people, and I'm spending my days fixing things that only break at volume - the kind of problem you simply cannot find with 700 downloads and no traffic. Tiring, but it feels completely different from before: this is working with a live product real people depend on, not polishing something in silence. That part is genuinely wonderful.
Your story is soo relatable! Growing the product with no marketing team requires lots of creativity and consistency...And being stuck is a part of this journey
And what concerns emails from users, it's an undescribable feeling, really. Motivates more than anything and gives the feeling of making smth really useful.
Thanks for sharing your approuches!
As for our SMM, we have Instagram & Threads, Linkedin and TikTok accounts. They're pretty fresh (except for Linkedin) and it's hard to run them all at once for 2 people and we're also not into 'talking videos'. Which account brings more visitors than the others? In our case, it's not an Instagram but Linkedin and TikTok 'cause it seems their algorithms are built to spread content wider than across your network. That's just an observation so far, not a real recommendation. Hope it helps anyways.
Perhaps, anyone here tried Google Ads?
Thank you! And yes, the emails are the thing nobody warns you about. Downloads are a number; a stranger taking twenty minutes to write you a bug report with screenshots is something else entirely.
Small correction though, since it changes the maths: there's no marketing team here, it's just me. Your LinkedIn/TikTok finding is interesting because mine points the opposite way, and I think it's because I don't use these platforms for reach at all. Threads is my one channel, and it works not because the algorithm spreads my posts but because I can search for the conversation already happening - "which water tracker do you use?", "what app for tasks and long-term planning?" - and answer that person directly. One install at a time, and it produced every growth spike this app has had.
Instagram is what I want to grow next. My search-and-answer trick doesn't exist there, so organically it hasn't given me much yet, but I read that as needing a different mode: a shopwindow plus paid promotion instead of conversations. The app is visual enough to earn that - the bonsai tree that grows with your streak, the themes, the share cards. No Google Ads experience here, but Instagram ads are exactly what I'm considering, so: did you try paid promotion there, or only organic? That's the gap in my data before I spend money.
Hey! I misspelled, I meant 'with NO marketing' team as my wife does all the marketing by herself :)
We've tried only organic so far. As for the Threads, joining the discussions there hasn't shown real results so far. But as I've studied it requires consistency (like at least 2 meaningful posts a day) and the result is long-term, not instant. So we'll keep it a part of the strategy.
Sooo... let's sync here once we fill our knowledge gaps about these channels or once we actually try Google ads and you try Ig ads to share the experience. Sounds like a plan?
Really interesting update, especially the point about your growth spikes coming from simply being useful in communities where your users already hang out. I’m building a consumer app too and distribution has definitely been the harder part compared to building the product.
Also like the idea of picking one clear “door” to market an all-in-one product rather than trying to explain everything upfront. Have you noticed whether people who come in for one specific feature end up adopting the other modules over time?
Distribution being the harder half - painfully yes. The product is the part you fully control; distribution is the part where you're a guest in someone else's system, and every one of those systems has its own rules and its own immune response.
When I moved to Health & Fitness I rebuilt onboarding around the health side: it asks for your body parameters and builds a personal plan from them - water, sleep, calories, steps - and then ends by having you create your first task, which is the bridge back to the productivity half. So people don't walk in through one door and discover the rest later; they arrive with several modules already switched on. Whatever cross-module adoption I see, I handed it to them.
What I can say is that it's working better than I feared. Water and food get tracked heavily, tasks do get created, and "everything at once" doesn't seem to overwhelm people - my worry was that eight modules would read as clutter, and so far it reads as choice. Which module eventually wins is still open; I need more months before I'd trust an answer.
I think that having no-one to compete with full stack can be read 2 ways. Quiet straightforward assesment is that they have not thought about it and hence it makes sense to pursue to tap an unexplored market. However, this could also mean that they thought about it and rejected developing the full stack due to its value and more importantly investment-to-profitability ratio.
Nevertheless, having more features is not necesarily a bad thing as long as you deliver and diffrentiate with competitors on the features that really matter to the users. So, my honest suggestion is to get more user feedback or run a POLL to check which of your unique features resonate with the users top sought features. This could help you reposition in the market to the exact demographics. Best of luck!
Thank you!
Before committing to 2.0 I went looking at the products that tried to be everything at once. What I found it was a handful of things that had been sitting in pre-release for a very long time. All-in-one doesn't usually die on the spreadsheet; it dies on sheer volume of work. Eight modules is eight products' worth of edge cases. My read is that it survives mostly when the person building it is also the person who needs it every morning - that's a far more stubborn reason to keep going than a roadmap.
My reference point was Notion, but I wanted the opposite trade-off. Notion will be anything you want - after you assemble it yourself, block by block. I wanted the functionality to arrive already built, and the customization to be a toggle rather than a construction project. That's why every module is optional: you're not designing your system, you're switching off the parts you don't need.
On the poll - agreed, and a quiet version of it is already running. Since 2.0 users have been emailing me (bug reports with screenshots, feature requests), and that inbox has become my product team. On top of that, the modular design is a continuous survey in itself: I can see which modules people actually switch on and off, which tends to be more honest than what they'd tick in a form. What I still owe myself is tying that to retention instead of just counting it.
The moment your measurement signal shifted - from "700 downloads" to "users writing me emails with specific requests" - that's the signal that matters, and it only appears after product-market alignment. You shipped 2.0 and suddenly the silent metric (downloads) became transparent (direct feedback).
On the multi-functional positioning trap: the issue is that your single-shelf problem changes depending on the person. For someone drowning in subscriptions, your door is "consolidation." For someone in crisis, it's "one calm place." For someone optimizing, it's "holistic tracking." Those are three different people arriving through three different doors - and each one needs to see a different first-impression.
The all-in-one curse isn't the feature count, it's that you have to pick which door gets the storefront real estate. But your 2.0.1 calendar feature shipped in ten days because someone actually asked - that's the feedback loop other single-purpose apps never get. The people who love what you built love it precisely because you built everything they need in one place. Maybe the measurement to track is retention and LTV (your superpower), not acquisition CPA (their superpower).
Thank you! The three doors metaphor is a keeper. It matches what I see in reviews: the "replaced 3 apps" person and the "one calm place" person are clearly not the same buyer.
Funny enough, I almost built a version of "different first impressions": letting people pick their modules during onboarding. I backed off for one reason - I was afraid nobody would ever open a module they didn't pick on day one, while removing one takes a single tap anytime. So for now everyone sees the whole house first and trims it down, not the other way around.
And yes - retention is exactly where my focus already lives. Your framing is a good reminder that it's the right way:)
700 downloads and stuck is a distribution problem, not a product problem — and the fix is usually unglamorous.
The pattern that works when growth is flat: stop optimizing the product for a month and go sell one unit manually, every week. Not "post more" — actually identify one person with the problem, reach out directly, and get them using the thing while you watch.
I work in the course/creator space (I run iLoquio) and the parallel I see constantly: creators with "nobody is buying" are almost always waiting for inbound that has no reason to exist yet. The first 10-20 customers in any knowledge or app business come from outbound conversations, not discovery. The manual phase isn't a failure state — it's the phase where you learn which words make people pay, and those words later become the marketing that does scale.
One question worth answering honestly: of the 700 downloads, how many did you personally talk to? If the answer is near zero, that's the cheapest growth lever you have left untouched.
This is very close to what actually works for me - I just run it in public threads instead of DMs. My Threads playbook isn't "post more": I search for specific people asking specific questions - "where do you track your water?", "which calorie tracker do you use?", "what app for tasks + long-term planning?" - and answer each one personally, suggesting SelfOS where it genuinely fits. One person, one conversation, one install at a time. That's what produced every growth spike this app has had, and it's exactly your "learn which words make people pay" phase: by now I know which phrasings convert, because I've typed them hundreds of times at real humans, not into a keyword tool.
I ran the identical playbook on Reddit and got banned within two weeks 😄 Same behavior, different immune system.
But where you've got me is "watch them use it": with a no-account, on-device app I literally can't see anyone's usage, and live 1:1 conversations with existing users have been rare - mostly whoever emails me first.
Local-only + data export is a strong selling point, more apps should do this. One thing I wonder - shopping lists almost beg for sharing with a partner. Any plans for that, or would it break the “no account” philosophy?
Thank you! And good news - shopping lists can already be shared, there's a share option that sends the list through the system share sheet, so you can drop it straight into whatever messenger your partner actually uses.
Real-time sync between two phones is the honest gap though - that one genuinely needs a backend, and it's on the long-term radar. But whenever it comes, the rule stays the same: accounts optional, the app fully useful without one. That part of the philosophy isn't negotiable.