I built apps. The hard part wasn’t shipping — it was getting anyone to talk about them.

I built apps. The hard part wasn’t shipping — it was getting anyone to talk about them.

I’ve built and launched multiple apps.

And every time, I run into the same problem.

The app is finished.
The App Store page is live.
The screenshots are ready.
The product works.

Then comes the question:

How do I actually get people to discover it?

For indie developers, this is where things suddenly become messy.

You can post on Reddit.
You can launch on Product Hunt.
You can make TikToks yourself.
You can try paid ads.

But one of the most interesting channels is also one of the most painful:

getting creators to try and talk about your app.

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Finding creators is surprisingly painful

Let’s say I just launched a sleep app.

I want creators who talk about:

• iPhone apps
• productivity
• screen time
• sleep
• doomscrolling
• digital wellbeing

Sounds easy.

It isn’t.

I can search TikTok manually, open profile after profile, check whether the creator is active, check follower count, check whether they actually review apps, look for an email, copy everything into a spreadsheet, then write messages one by one.

After doing this for a while, I realized something:

I wasn’t promoting my app anymore. I was doing manual data entry.

Existing influencer platforms solve parts of this problem, but most of them are built for brands, agencies, ecommerce campaigns and large influencer budgets.

They ask you to think like a marketer.

Filters.
Audience demographics.
Campaign pipelines.
Creator payments.
Marketplace listings.

But as an indie developer, my question is much simpler:

Here is my App Store link. Who is actually likely to review it?

That’s the product I want to build.

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The idea

The workflow should be almost stupidly simple.

You paste your App Store URL.

The system understands your app:

Sleep app
iPhone utility
Productivity
Digital wellbeing
Target user: people who scroll too late at night

Then it searches a large creator database and returns something like:

63 creators are a strong match for your app

But not just random influencers.

I want it to prioritize creators who are actually useful to developers:

• relevant niche
• appropriate follower size
• active account
• public business contact
• history of reviewing apps or tools
• audience aligned with the product
• more likely to respond to indie developers

Instead of:

“Here are 20,000 influencers.”

I want:

“Here are the 37 people you should contact first.”

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Starting with a 1M creator database

The first technical building block already exists.

I’m working with a dataset containing roughly 1 million TikTok creator profiles.

It includes data such as:

• username
• bio
• region
• language
• follower count
• following count
• video count
• total likes
• verification status

A percentage of creators also publish business emails directly in their bios.

That means the initial database can be cleaned, indexed and classified instead of starting from zero.

The interesting part isn’t really the million rows, though.

A giant database alone is not valuable.

The filtering is.

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Where AI actually helps

I don’t want the product to just run keyword searches.

Imagine an app description says:

“An alarm that isn’t completed until you physically put your iPhone face down.”

Traditional filtering might only classify it as:

alarm / sleep

But the real creator opportunities might be:

productivity
digital wellness
iPhone utilities
student routines
doomscrolling
ADHD productivity
sleep habits

That’s where AI becomes useful.

The system can analyze the App Store page, extract the product’s real use cases, identify likely audiences, and create a creator profile automatically.

Then the creator side can also be classified from bios, public content signals and profile metadata.

The match becomes:

App semantics × Creator semantics × Contactability × Creator behavior

Eventually I want every creator to have something closer to a:

Review Likelihood

For example:

87 / 100 — High

Why?

• frequently talks about iPhone apps
• public business email available
• 24K followers
• active recently
• audience matches productivity apps
• has reviewed similar apps before

That is much more useful than another generic “AI match score.”

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The bigger vision

The first version is a creator discovery and outreach tool.

But I think the long-term opportunity is much bigger.

Today, every indie developer starts distribution almost from zero.

You build an app.

Then you rebuild your marketing network from scratch.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I want to create an infrastructure layer for app distribution.

Over time, the platform could learn:

• which creators respond to indie developers
• which creators accept free app access
• which creators only do paid partnerships
• which categories they review
• how often they respond
• which creators actually publish after accepting
• which creators generate downloads
• which creators generate subscriptions

At that point, it stops being an influencer database.

It becomes a network connecting app developers with people who discover and review apps.

Creators could eventually join directly and say:

Open to reviewing productivity apps
Open to free access
Paid collaborations only
Interested in AI apps
Interested in iOS utilities

Developers could launch an app and instantly reach the right people.

Something like:

App Store link → 50 relevant reviewers → outreach → reviews → downloads

That’s the vision.

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I don’t want to build another giant influencer platform

I actually want to remove features.

No giant marketing dashboard.

No complicated agency workflow.

No 30 filters before you can see a creator.

The first version should basically be:

Paste app → Find creators → Contact creators → Track results

That’s it.

And instead of charging hundreds of dollars per month, I’m considering a free tier plus small launch-based plans aimed specifically at indie developers.

Because most developers don’t need an influencer marketing platform every day.

They need one when they launch.

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Would you use this?

I’m still shaping the first version, so I’d rather hear criticism now than spend weeks building the wrong thing.

If you build iOS, Android, SaaS or AI products:

Would you use a tool that takes your app URL and gives you a ranked list of creators you can actually contact?

And what matters more to you?

Creator discovery?
Verified emails?
AI matching?
Bulk personalized outreach?
Tracking who actually posted?

If this sounds useful, leave a comment and say “interested” or “waitlist.”

I’ll put together an early-access list and share the first version with people here before launching it publicly.

And if you think the idea is flawed, tell me that too.

That feedback is probably even more useful right now.