My landing page converts at 6.5%. I still only make $27 a week.
I make a $9 one-time Mac app that keeps your Downloads and Desktop organized. Solo dev, Santiago de Chile, no funding, no team.
This week I finally sat down and looked at the numbers instead of guessing, and the result was not what I expected. Posting it here because I think the shape of it is more common than people admit.
Last 7 days:
- 110 visitors
- 46 of them on macOS
- 10 of those opened the checkout (22%)
- 3 bought
So visitor-to-sale on my actual addressable traffic is 6.5%. From what I can tell that is around 3x what a normal software landing page does. My conversion is not the problem. My conversion is the best thing I have.
And I made $27.
For about a week before I ran those numbers I was convinced the product was bad. I had gone days without a sale and I was rewriting the pricing page in my head at 2am. Then I did the math: with 46 qualified visitors and a 6.5% rate, the chance of getting zero sales in a given week is roughly a coin flip. I had been reading pure noise as a verdict on my work.
Two things that surprised me:
58% of my traffic cannot install my app. 29 people on Windows, 14 on Linux, 13 on iPhone, 8 on Android. They came, they read the page, and they could not have bought it if they wanted to. My visitor counter was going up and my bank account was not, and that is most of the explanation.
One blog post beat a week of daily posting. A German blogger reviewed the app and gave it 5/5. That single article is my number one referrer, and Germany is now my third biggest country by visitors. Meanwhile I had spent that same week posting videos to TikTok every day. TikTok does not appear in my referrer list at all. Not low. Absent.
In hindsight it is obvious: someone scrolling TikTok on their phone is not sitting at a Mac and is not going to buy a Mac utility. But I did not see it until the data was in front of me.
What I have done since: wrote to 13 Mac blogs, newsletters and reviewers in four languages, in one day. Wrote a technical article for my own site instead of a press release. Went back to the boring channels: search intent, Mac communities, people who write "best Mac apps" roundups that rank on Google.
What I would ask this community:
If you sell a small desktop tool, where did your buyers actually come from? Not where you posted, where they came from. I am fairly sure my answer is "search and other people's blogs" and that everything else has been me feeling productive.
And if you have ever been in the position of having a conversion rate you are proud of and revenue you are embarrassed by, I would like to hear how long it took to fix and what actually moved it.
The app is Tidy if anyone wants to look: tidymacapp.com. I am not trying to sell it here, and honestly most of you are not the customer. I would rather have the answer to the question.
Update, five days later, because the whole point of the post was the numbers.
Three days after writing this I had the best day in the app's history: 8 sales in one day. Previous record was 3.
What did it: two things landed at once. A write-up on MacMagazine, the biggest Apple site in Brazil, and a post on HN. Three of those sales were from Brazil — so I spent the next morning adding BRL pricing and Pix, and translating the delivery email into Portuguese. If a country buys, meet it where it pays.
The thesis of the original post held up embarrassingly well. The blog written in a country's own language converted. TikTok still does not appear in my referrers. Not low — absent.
Two more things I fixed since, both found by looking instead of guessing:
My homepage was serving 46 words to crawlers (React SPA). My refunds page outranked my actual homepage on Google for my own brand name. Prerendered the content into the HTML: 46 words → 1,865. If your landing page is an SPA, curl it once. You might meet your refunds page.
And version 2.3 shipped this week, built almost entirely from two users' bug reports. One of them had told me "I clicked the notifications and nothing happened" — turned out macOS eats the first click on a non-frontmost app. The fix took a day. Finding out it was broken took a stranger being kind enough to write.
Still $27-ish weeks between the spikes. But the machine is starting to look like a machine.
The interesting part here is that the 6.5% conversion rate wasn't really the insight — it was discovering how much of the traffic was never commercially addressable in the first place.
It sounds like the bigger shift is from asking “how do I get more traffic?” to “which sources consistently produce people who can actually buy?”
Exactly — and once I saw it, I started grading channels on a different axis: not "visitors per week" but "can this visitor even run the app, and were they already looking for something like it?"
The niche directories proved it this week. A Mac-apps directory sends me a handful of visitors a day, and they convert at a multiple of everything else, because macOS is a given and the intent arrived pre-formed. Meanwhile the big generic platforms sent me nice round numbers that never turned into anything.
The uncomfortable conclusion: my best "channel" turned out to be other people's Mac-only spaces — directories, forums, one German blog — and most of what I did on big platforms was decoration. Qualified beats big, every time I've actually measured it.
That’s a pretty strong finding, especially the gap between qualified niche traffic and generic volume. I’d be interested in continuing the conversation — if you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you at?
Sure — hola@tidymacapp.com reaches me directly. Happy to compare notes.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.