Indie App Devs #24
Weekly tips for indie app developers.
Hello! 👋
Oleh Stasula, the founder of WinWinKit, a marketing platform built for iOS, Android, and desktop apps, and Usage, a system activity monitor that helps you keep an eye on your device activity.
Is coming back for the part 2. In the part 1 he shared a few personal tips on how he designs apps users love.
This is part 2 - about what to do once you’ve shipped, because shipping without marketing will keep your product invisible.
Let’s dive in!
Check WinWinKit and Usage. Follow Oleh on X/Twitter and LinkedIn!
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Marketing Apps as a Developer
If Part 1 was about designing great apps, this one is about what to do once you’ve shipped, because shipping without marketing will keep your product invisible.
I’m not going to pretend I have a universal playbook.
Every app is different, every founder is different, and what worked for me may not be the right starting point for you. But I do have a way of thinking about it, and a few channels that have actually moved the needle for me.
That’s what this post is about.👇
Start with Building a Solid Product
Marketing is much easier when the product does some of the work for you.
Most of the growth I’ve had on Usage started with the product itself being worth a second look. People recommend it because it’s clean, because it does what it says, and because it feels nice to use.
That’s marketing too!
So before I think about channels, I think about whether the product is actually shareable. Is there a moment in it that’s screenshot-worthy? Does it solve something people care enough about to mention to a friend?
This isn’t about polish for polish’s sake. It’s about making sure that when someone discovers your app - through any channel - there’s enough there to convert them, and ideally enough to make them tell someone else.
Pick Channels You're Actually Comfortable With
There are dozens of ways to market an app:
Paid ads
Content marketing
SEO/ASO/GEO
Influencer marketing
Communities
PR
Product directories
Social media
And many other ways.
You can’t do all of them well, and I have experience with only a few.
I genuinely try to go with the channels I’m comfortable with. I don’t run paid acquisition, for example. I’m not good at performance creative, and I don’t have a marketing team to optimize spend. So I don’t do it. Other indies are brilliant at it and grow fast - that’s their channel, not mine.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways to grow products.
My usual pick is finding and optimizing cost-effective channels. For me, that has been a mix of organic reviews, ASO, and showing up early to things Apple cares about. None of those requires a big budget. All of them require taste, patience, and consistency.
Get Featured by Apple
Getting featured by Apple has been some of the best marketing I’ve ever had. It’s also one of the most predictable, if you’re paying attention.
Apple features apps that make their platform look good. That means apps that adopt new system features early, follow their guidelines, look polished, and tell a clear story on the store page.
A few things I’ve tried that have worked:
Use App Store Connect’s nomination form: It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and Apple’s editorial team actually reads it. Submit when you launch, when you do a meaningful update, and when you have something tied to a system theme.
Time your updates around Apple’s calendar: An update tied to a new framework, a new OS release, or a hardware launch is much more likely to get picked up than one in a quiet week.
Show, don’t tell, in your screenshots and preview: Apple’s editors are evaluating your store presence as much as your app.
I’ve had features that brought in tens of thousands of downloads in a few days. The price of admission is just making a really good app and putting in the effort to show it well.
Adopt Apple's New Frameworks Early
This one overlaps with Apple features, but it deserves its own section because the payoff is bigger than just editorial coverage.
Every WWDC, Apple announces new frameworks, new APIs, new design directions. Most apps wait a year or two before adopting them. The ones that ship support on day one get a disproportionate share of attention. Apple is actively looking for them. Press is actively looking for them.
I’ve made it a habit to scan every WWDC for one or two things I can credibly support in my apps within a few weeks. Sometimes it’s a system framework, sometimes it’s just a small UI affordance. The point is to be in the small group of apps that show up when the new thing ships. This is essentially free marketing.
What I'm Trying Now: Content Creator Marketing
The channels above all worked for me - but I’d be lying if I said they all still work as well as they used to. The App Store is more crowded than ever. Apple features are harder to get. ASO gains take longer to compound.
The next big bet I believe in is content creator marketing.
Not paid influencer drops, not one-off sponsorships. I mean genuine, ongoing relationships with creators whose audiences overlap with your users - where the creator actually uses the product, talks about it the way they’d talk about anything else they like, and gets rewarded fairly for the value they bring in. It sits somewhere between the organic reviews I mentioned earlier and a structured affiliate program.
I’ve watched a handful of apps grow almost entirely through this channel. They didn’t do it by spamming creators with cold DMs. They did it by making it easy for creators to find them, try the product, share it on their own terms, and get paid when they drove real results.
This is also the thesis behind WinWinKit - making it simple for app developers to run referral and creator programs without building all the plumbing themselves.
I’m building it because I want to use it. The next phase of indie app marketing, in my view, is going to be less about owning a single channel and more about turning your best users and creators into a distribution layer that grows with you.
Want to learn more? 👇
Check WinWinKit and Usage. Follow Oleh on X/Twitter and LinkedIn!