How I'm marketing my app (480% growth over 2 weeks)

The purpose of this post is to describe: how I'm distributing my mobile app and things I'd like to try in the future. You'll find this post useful if you're curious about mistakes one can make in mobile marketing and what initial successes look like.

What am I working on? I'm working on a meditation and journal app that combines the philosophy of Stoicism, Stoa. I'll write more about why am I working on this in future.

I did a soft launch with friends and interested Facebook communities in the beginning of this year.

I also:

• Posted in relevant Facebook groups. This was a good idea and had a high payoff. Like all channels, it has had a lower payoff over time.
• Posted in a Reddit group. I made two mistakes here, I didn't follow the subreddit rules on self-promotion and underestimated how much users would care about permissions and used a package that asked unnecessarily for all permissions by default. Someone commented: Downvote the fuck outta this. Clear data mining app.. Which is reasonably close to what happened.
• Ran Facebook Ads. This was useful for an initial test about how many engagements the add would get, but wasn't useful as a distribution strategy. Unpaid channels are the way to go initially.

For nearly three months, I didn't put much time into marketing the app. Downloads from the play store decreased significantly. Downloads in the Play Store remained reasonably constant.

Last month, I added more content, made technical improvements, and started charging people (yes -- I should have done this earlier). I ended the month with 10 subscribers. I also started tweeting daily, which has made very small impact on traffic to the website.

What am I doing now (September)? This month, I’ve moved more of my time into distribution.

• ASO: app store optimization is important. Use an app like apptweak to track keywords. I suspect if someone is building a mobile app and hasn't done any of this, there will be some low hanging fruit they can pick within the free trial period.
• Content marketing: I'm writing on Medium more, chatting more with people who I'd like to talk to anyway, being sure to share my own and others related content. There's a case for using one's own domain rather than Medium, but over the short-term I've chosen Medium since I have a high prior that a decent chunk of target users are there anyway.
• Podcasts and interviews. Run a podcast? I'd love to chat.
• Continue social media engagement.
• Improved the screenshots and icon. Very important, especially for the app store.

I now have 48 subscribers. The growth explained by: technical improvements, additional content, increased Facebook and Twitter engagement, and content marketing over the past month and a half (there's 2 week free trial period). Most of this growth is from new users.

What will I do in the following months?

• Interact with influencer types
• Double down on other strategies with high payoffs. Right now that looks like content marketing, potentially ASO
• Bigger launch (Reddit communities, Product Hunt, etc.)