How I tried to grow a new app (VoxPho) with $0 marketing budget

I’m building a small indie app called VoxPho.
It lets you attach voice notes directly onto photos — so a single image can contain multiple “sound moments” instead of being silent.

I didn’t have a marketing budget at all, so I started trying to grow it using only free channels. Here’s what actually happened so far.

1. Indie Hacker communities (Indie Hackers / Reddit)
   This was my first instinct.
   I thought posting “I built X” would work.

It didn’t.

Posts that are just announcements get ignored or removed quickly.

What worked slightly better:

talking about the problem first, not the app
asking for opinions instead of promotion
framing it as an experiment instead of a launch
Example angle I used:
“What if photos weren’t silent? Would adding voice layers change how we remember moments?”
That got actual comments.
2. Product Hunt / forums mindset shift
I realized something important:
People don’t care about your product.
They care about what you’re trying to understand.

So instead of “download VoxPho”, I started writing like:

“I’m testing whether photos should carry sound”
“I’m exploring if memory can be multi-layered”
This reduced resistance a lot.
3. What didn’t work
posting links directly
overly polished marketing copy
“please try my app” messages
repetitive self-promotion comments
These got basically zero traction.
4. What I’m still testing (VoxPho-specific)
Right now VoxPho is being used more like a concept prototype than a polished product.
I’m still testing:

whether people actually record voice on photos
whether “multi-voice per image” makes sense
whether memory-based sharing is more interesting than feed-based sharing
5. Honest takeaway so far
If you’re building your first indie app:
Don’t start with marketing
Start with a question people want to argue about
Wrap your product inside that question
That’s the only thing that’s consistently brought engagement so far.
If anyone here has done $0 growth successfully, I’d love to hear how you approached it differently.