📣 Free marketing channels that work in 2024, my wins and fails

Hi there, Egor here 🌪

I’ve made 5 apps in the last 2 months, and my recent app hit 300+ installs over the weekend! Today, I want to share what I do for promotion: what platforms I posted on, how many posts I made before seeing results, and what I learned along the way.

Quick update on my apps

My challenge of creating one app per week continues, but the pace has slowed down a bit. I’m now developing apps for both the App Store and Google Play simultaneously, and the moderation timing is somewhat unpredictable, so this takes a bit more time. Recently, I managed to release an app in two weeks instead of one.

Over the weekend, I released my fifth project — StepAhead (iOS). It helps users overcome procrastination and the so-called “blank page syndrome”, which I also struggled with while developing my apps (that’s actually how the idea was born.) The app is super simple to use. Just add the task you’re procrastinating on, and it’ll break it down into small, manageable steps to help you get started. Please let me know if you test it; I’d really appreciate your feedback.

My previous apps:

1. Feedback Loop (iOS) — to prepare for job interviews (AI product management)
2. Space Academy (iOS/Android) — interesting facts about space in a quiz format
3. Prompt Forge (iOS) — teaches you how to code with AI
4. GiggleOhms (iOS/Android) — AI-generated jokes for hardware engineers

How do you get installs without an audience (or money for ads)?

To gain traction, an app needs an audience, but where do you get that audience if the project has just been released? Growing a personal brand on social media takes time, and friends and colleagues are often too small of a push for the App Store or Medium’s recommendation systems to notice the project.

At this point, I mostly want to validate product ideas to see if they have a fit rather than actively promote them and spend money on it. So, I’ve been testing various free methods for the past two months and want to share my findings with you. I even got my girlfriend involved in the marketing, but more on that later!

Reddit

Reddit was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about promotion. I got the first 10,000 views for my app that helps coding with prompts (Prompt Forge) precisely on this platform. I tested two strategies:

1. Indirect: I shared the app on relevant subreddits and asked for feedback.
2. Direct: I simply posted promotional content about the app.

Finding suitable communities for developers was not difficult since I am a developer myself. Still, I also used the Reddit Community Finder (which I learned about here on Indie Hackers).

Results: 29 posts, 12 comments with feedback, about 10,000 views according to Reddit statistics, and around 150 registrations. My plan was working as expected until Reddit removed all my posts for “Project Promotion” and blocked my account :) Anyway, I learned from this experience (and created a new account).

Tip: Besides Reddit Community Finder, there are other services that automate Reddit marketing. I also use Reply Hub to track new posts in communities by keywords, as I've expanded my strategy a bit and now try to natively talk about relevant apps in comments on other posts. It seems to be working.

TikTok

There aren't many social networks now where you can get a lot of traffic for free. However, you can still hit the jackpot with TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, so I decided to give it a try too.

I asked my girlfriend to help me with this, because I don't spend as much time on social media as she does, and my awareness of trends and viral content isn’t very high. She quickly came up with a few ideas on how to create something trendy (spoiler: try to use trending sounds and jokes) that would also drive installs and, ideally, purchases.

The first videos we uploaded to TikTok easily got 600-700 views, thanks to TikTok’s algorithm favoring new content. This initial boost gave us motivation to keep going, and after 5 more attempts, one of the videos finally reached 2,700 views!

We tried to mix videos advertising the apps with regular content to avoid being shadowbanned or outright banned like on Reddit. After another 14 videos, we managed to create a video that clearly caused FOMO (yes, it's a screenshot with icons and captions). The video got 4,300 views and generated 50-80 installs for each app. Yes, it's not much, but what if the next video gets a million views? 😏

Our most successful video has almost 6,000 views and has generated nearly 100 installs for my new anti-procrastination app, StepAhead, in just one day! And it’s still getting new views.

Main advice here: besides trending sounds and memes, consistency is key! Don't give up if you only get 100-200 views. TikTok still works and rewards the bold and creative!

App Directories

Another hypothesis I tested was listing my apps on free resources such as AI service directories, themed communities, and websites where you can talk about your project without getting banned.

I found 51 suitable websites and submitted applications to all of them. Was it worth the effort and all the filled-out briefs? Hardly. Out of 51 sites, only 4 reviewed and listed my app, resulting in a conversion rate of 7.8%. This brought me around 20 installs. Considering the time I spent on this, I really hoped for a higher ROI. I guess it might work if you pay for a better spot and extra push, but that wasn’t an option for me.

I also considered placements in newsletters, hoping someone would feature my app free of charge, but these attempts were also in vain. My emails to newsletter authors went unanswered 90% of the time, and if they did respond, they sent their price list for placement in the newsletter (totally understandable, but again, not within my budget).

A miracle (also known as virality)

This weekend, almost immediately after the release of my new app StepAhead, AppRaven listed it on their platform. The app made it to the top of the "popular" section and different users' collections of apps for people with ADHD. How this happened is still a mystery, but I'm grateful for the few hundred downloads that boosted my dopamine level. It seems that with my fifth app, I finally developed something viral!

Thank you for reading to the end! Please support the post with upvotes and comments. If you're interested in mobile apps promotion, I also wrote a guide on ASO (App Store Optimization).

In the near future, I’m planning to launch on Product Hunt to see how it works, and get more active on Medium and Twitter. If you want to stay connected, give me a follow!