this history app's marketing is INSANE. -> $100k–$500k in estimated monthly revenue -> 50k–100k estimated monthly downloads -> ai-generated history videos getting hundreds of thousands of views and the most interesting part? they can sell you the subscription before you even download the app it's called Paladin, an app that turns history into bite-sized stories their content follows the same idea they take a historical event and turn it into a story using simple characters, ai visuals, narration and captions one video tells the story of Britain, China and the opium trade another tells the story of Marie Antoinette and a diamond necklace they don't feel like app ads they feel like short history documentaries you actually want to finish those two videos alone got 400k and 232k views and they don't rely on just one account they use multiple accounts with different types of history content to reach more people Paladin doesn't stop at organic content either they also run history videos as ads on Instagram but instead of sending you straight to the App Store, the ad takes you to a website there, you go through a series of questions, like an app onboarding then you reach a paywall and after that, you're directed to download the app the content gets you interested in history the onboarding gets you thinking about learning more and the paywall offers the app as the next step because the payment happens on the web, those purchases can also avoid the App Store's in-app purchase commission what makes this work as a marketing system: -> create content your audience would watch even if your app didn't exist -> make that content feel connected to what your app actually offers -> use ads to put your stories in front of more people -> turn that interest into a personalized onboarding before the download -> use multiple accounts to test different types of content and reach more people I will be posting a brand analysis daily, so follow for more.

Is Apple really banning feature flags? Nick Dobos (@NickADobos) called attention to guideline 2.5.19. But as Apple's developer update clarifies, it is an extension of 2.3.1 regarding hidden features rather than an outright ban on A/B testing: go.peterfriese.dev/business-…

Apple’s clunky TestFlight sharing and App Store deployment might be the only thing propping up the entire economy of indie app developers building small, personal apps. Once I can build, install, and share from a prompt, what happens to to-do apps, recipe managers, etc.

Introducing Sextant: App Store intelligence built by an indie dev, for indie devs. I've been building iOS apps since 2017, and I've poured everything I've learned about ASO into this tool. Most indie apps target keywords they'll never rank for. Sextant is a Mac app that maps who ranks for every search around your app, scores each one by fit, popularity and difficulty, and tells you which ones you can actually win. It's live on Product Hunt today 🚀 (link bellow)

We hit $900K MRR by doing the opposite of every SaaS advice you've read. Here's 5 counter-intuitive hacks that got us there: 1 - Don't chase paying users. Chase free users. Most SaaS hide everything behind a paywall, so nobody feels the value before paying. On Trendtrack, our data is free but the day you want to analyze one specific brand, usually your competitor, you have to pay. Every free user is a lead you own. You can email them, retarget them, push offers in the app or message them on support. Give enough value for people to want more. Then charge for the "more". 2 - Add friction to your onboarding. Everyone tells you to remove steps. I add questions instead: I ask about their goal, their job and where they come from. If someone wants to analyze trends and works as a creative strategist, we show them the right filters on day one. They get the value in 2 minutes, and every email after that speaks to their goal. 3 - "Too expensive" doesn't exist. It's our #1 churn reason. So I called the people who left, one by one. Nobody left because of the price. They left because they never reached their goal. If you find your dream house, you find a way to get the loan. "Too expensive" just means they didn't get enough value. Just fix the path to their goal. 4 - Launch boring features like they're huge. A launch is marketing, not a feature. Three things make it big. You need an angle: one company called a basic contact feature "the Tinder of sales". You need a motion video, because it always beats a facecam. And you need distribution: we asked the users who love us to help push it. 5 - Do by hand what everyone automates. Every week I watch the best creator videos with my small notebook. I write down the hook, the tone, the thumbnail and the exact moment the story starts. Then I turn it into scripts for our next creators. No tool can tell you why a video worked, you have to watch it. Before you automate something, do it 100 times by hand. You know me now, nothing fancy here. It's just logic and a lot of reps. Let's get in the mud.

HOW MY APP GOT 50 APP STORE RATINGS IN 4 WEEKS (MY GOAL WAS 10) ⭐ you asked yesterday, here is everything : where : - the rating prompt is the LAST screen of my onboarding, right before the paywall - people just answered questions about themselves and saw a short demo. it's their most excited moment the screen : - title "your rating helps us grow" - 5 stars as decoration only, you can't tap them - apple's real rating popup opens by itself the change that helped : - the popup used to open after 3.5 sec. tap continue before that and you never see it - oct 6 I moved it to 1 sec - before : ~5 ratings for 62 people who saw the screen - after : 45 ratings for ~440 people, about 1 in 10 where I copied it : a pregnancy app with ~50K reviews does the exact same thing before its paywall 👀 apple's rules : - only apple's popup, no custom stars that collect the rating - never ask for 5 stars - apple decides if the popup shows, 3 times a year max per person - it never shows in testflight the downside : I tracked 5 of my 1 star ratings. none of them ever subscribed. they rate an onboarding, not the app 🥲 would you keep it before the paywall or move it after the first real use ??

One push-up app that's blowing up right now: Push Up Arena, an RPG where you defeat enemies by doing push-ups. $11K/month. The onboarding is 46 screens. Halfway through setup, you actually do push-ups to defeat an enemy. Letting users experience the core loop inside onboarding drives commitment, and that's almost certainly why its conversion rate is so strong. Pricing: hard paywall, no free plan. Both annual and monthly come with a 3-day free trial. On top of that, "do push-ups to beat monsters" is visually catchy and a genuinely fun concept. Just posting clips of people using the app goes viral again and again. See Push Up Arena's full onboarding flow and viral social videos on Onbo Hub 👇 onbo-hub.com/apps/push-up-ar… xitter.cf/stat_biz/status/211030…

A few days ago, Apple froze all payouts for Verbi. And for the first time since starting this business, I genuinely felt like everything we had built could disappear. Here's what happened: Verbi has been growing insanely fast over the past few months. Revenue has been going up, we've expanded to more languages, and we've built a marketing operation with over 30 creators. But there was one number I wasn't happy with, our refund rate. It started at around 9% and gradually climbed to an average of 18% over the past two months. We were still profitable, but losing that much revenue to refunds was obviously not sustainable. We knew we needed to improve the product. So for the past month and a half, we've been building Verbi V2. A massive update with a completely redesigned experience, improved learning features, and fixes for a lot of the bugs our users had reported. We were finally getting close to releasing it. Literally in the middle of testing V2 with our QA testers, I woke up to an email from Apple. Our developer account had been flagged for violating App Review Guideline 5.6.4 (App Quality). All our payouts were immediately put on hold, and Apple warned that our developer account could be terminated. I can't even describe how stressful reading that email was. But instead of panicking, I spent the next few days trying to understand exactly WHY our refunds were so high. And what I found was pretty interesting. 89% of our refund requests over the past 90 days were categorized as "Unintended Purchase." That's a HUGE percentage. Our current subscription model offers a 3-day free trial, followed by an annual subscription. Looking at that data, I suspect a large portion of our refunds come from people simply forgetting to cancel their trials. I don't want to make money from someone who forgot to cancel. I want people to pay for Verbi because they actually enjoy using it. We already had an email and push notification reminding users before their trials expired, but clearly there's room to improve. So we're making some changes: We're introducing multiple reminders throughout the trial period, making the upcoming charge much more obvious, and adding a direct way to manage and cancel subscriptions from inside the app. At the same time, we finished V2. And that's important because not every refund is necessarily an accidental subscription. Our growth also came with some painful technical challenges. We experienced service disruptions, and expanding our learning experience to support more base languages introduced bugs that were difficult to catch. V2 addresses many of those problems, and we're putting much more effort into testing before releasing it. We've also made a pretty difficult business decision. We're pausing all marketing. All 40+ of our creators have been asked to temporarily stop posting. This is particularly painful because our creator campaigns have been responsible for so much of Verbi's growth. But I'd rather slow it down that have to lose it all. I will tweet more as things progress, but hopefully by the end we will have a much better app and understanding of how to grow it sustainably.

My indie dev revenue for September 2026! AdMob (ads): $819 App Store: $1,948 Google Play: $192 ------------------------ Total: $2,959 Full breakdown ↓ tsuzukit.com/blog/posts/inco… #indiedev #buildinpublic

Some of the shit I'm cooking with Claude right now is truly insane. None of this should be possible. None of it will matter but I'm having the time of my life right now