TrimrPix

A while back I posted here that my smallest app, TrimrPix, had reached number one in Photo and Video on the Danish App Store. That felt great for about a day.

Here is the honest follow-up. The spike was brief and local, and it never turned into steady installs. Months on, the app has a small handful of lifetime downloads, most of them from people already near me, and shipping a new release on its own brought in zero new users. The product works well. Almost nobody finds it.

I just shipped 1.6.0, with live progress for big batches and faster previews. That was the easy part. What I am actually short on is distribution. Ranking high for a moment taught me that a chart position is not the same as being discoverable, at least not this far down the long tail.

So I am trying to learn the boring part properly instead of shipping more features. For those of you selling small paid Mac or iOS utilities, what actually brought you steady downloads over time? I am curious which channels were worth the effort and which turned out to be noise.

Over the years, I have built a lot of apps. Big projects, complex flows, teams, roadmaps, and all that jazz. My app TrimrPix was the exact opposite.

I just had one small, annoying problem. Images take up too much space and metadata can be a mess. I wanted a quick, lightweight solution on my Mac to resize and compress images without opening heavy editors. So I built a small menu bar tool.

When it was done, I figured I might as well publish it. No big ambitions. And then it hit number one in the Photo & Video category in Denmark.

To be honest, I still do not know exactly how the App Store algorithm calculates these things. But one thing became very clear to me. Small, hyper-focused problems are highly underrated. We almost always talk about massive visions and platforms, but sometimes people just want a tool that does one single thing really well.

You can check it out here: https://trimrpix.iamjarl.com/ The code is also open source on GitHub if you want to see the SwiftUI setup.

Have you ever experienced that your smallest, simplest ideas ended up getting the most traction?