The morning after launching the app, I grabbed my phone as soon as I woke up.
5.
Looking at the download count on the App Store, I thought, "It's still small, but there's time." When I opened it three days later, it had become 8. "It's steadily growing," I felt a little relieved. And a week later, it stayed at 10 and stopped moving.
To be precise, 6 out of the 10 were me and people close to me who I forced to download it. Real downloads from strangers were just 4. An app I spent 2 months making had only reached 4 people in reality.
If I'm honest about the emotion I felt at that moment, "embarrassed" was closer than "frustrated." Nobody was laughing at me. But I couldn't shake the feeling that they were. There was an uncomfortable sense that I had fundamentally misunderstood something important, and it lingered for a while.
Back then, I genuinely believed that.
If the features were rich, if the UI was polished, users would naturally appear. Believing that, I just kept writing code. While watching apps that had "gone viral" in the indie dev community, I'd think things like, "That has a similar concept," or "I made mine more carefully down to the details."
This feeling was my first major misunderstanding.
Thousands of new apps are added to the App Store every day. Developers from around the world are lined up with things they believe in just like I did—"this will definitely be useful." In that context, "I made something good" isn't even at the starting line. I was hurt that it wasn't reaching people, without making any effort to deliver it.
But I couldn't see that back then, so I thought, "Maybe if I add more features, things will change," and kept updating without anyone knowing. The notifications stayed at 0, and only the version number kept going up.
Looking back at that period, I was really doing everything wrong.
I opened a dashboard nobody was watching every hour. I endlessly thought about why downloads weren't increasing. "Maybe the color is bad," "Maybe it's slow to launch," "Maybe the icon is too plain," I'd come up with baseless hypotheses and repeat fixes. I added 3 features. I redesigned the UI from scratch. I changed the description text dozens of times.
But I didn't communicate anything outward.
The core problem was simple. I was trying to be found while being unknown.
Sharing felt somehow scary. The act of "promoting my app on social media" seemed vaguely unseemly to me. I couldn't quite put it into words, but I think I felt, "It's not that great, but it would look exaggerated," and "I don't want to be seen as someone who's selling something."
But the fear went deeper than that.
When I put what I made out into the world and got zero response. Or when it was criticized. It felt like it wouldn't be an evaluation of what I made, but a rejection of myself, and that scared me. So I unconsciously chose not to put it out—that way I wouldn't get hurt.
One day, I saw an account with fewer than 100 followers post a single line saying "I made this" with one screenshot.
That post had 15 replies. 3 people wrote "I downloaded it."
I had spent 2 months adding features and improving the UI for 4 downloads. That person got 3 downloads from one post.
Comparing them might be pointless. But something broke.
"If you're not known, you don't exist," finally clicked for me—something obvious. No matter how carefully you make something, if nobody sees it, you don't even get a chance to be evaluated. I was polishing a product on an invisible shelf, waiting for customers to come.
What I changed after that was smaller than I expected.
First, I decided to post somewhere on the day it was finished. On X, one screenshot and a short line like "You can use this in situations like this." Not something grand like "promotion" or "announcement"—more like the extension of a diary entry.
At first, it took about 10 minutes to press the post button. But I pressed it.
Second, I tried putting it in indie dev community spaces (Discord, places like tsukutta). I nervously posted in a place where there's a culture of "showing what you made."
What happened there was unexpected. A stranger said, "I wanted something like this." Someone asked about features. I got specific feedback like, "If you did this here, it would be more usable."
It wasn't criticism. It was interest.
I almost cried at that moment. I'm not exaggerating—I really did. The fact that someone was interested in what I made felt like it rewarded those 2 months of lonely work.
Third, I rewrote the App Store description. Instead of listing "what it can do," I started with "what kind of person uses it in what kind of situation." Feature explanations moved to the second half.
I didn't change a single line of code. But that month's downloads increased a little. More than the numbers, the feeling of "it reached someone" came back, and that was so much bigger.
I could write here, "After that, downloads increased 10 times," and the story would wrap up neatly. But that's not what happened, so I won't write that.
The numbers increased gradually. There was no explosion. I'm still going steadily.
But something changed.
The heavy feeling of "it's my fault it's not known" disappeared. I finally understood—it was just that I hadn't made the effort to be known.
Getting feedback stopped being scary. It was scary at first. But most of the feedback that actually came was forward-looking, like "if you did this here." It wasn't total rejection. It wasn't being ignored.
And the fact that someone was interested in what I made became a reason to keep going. That might have been the biggest thing. The loneliness of making something alone becomes something completely different when even one person says "this is interesting."
If someone reading this thought, "I get it," I think you're probably in a similar place.
The app works fine. The features are well thought out. But it's not reaching people.
I don't think what you need then is one more feature. I think it's writing one line somewhere today.
tsukutta, X, Discord—anywhere is fine. "I made this," "I made this for people like this." That's all. You don't need a long essay. One screenshot is enough.
Delivering isn't promotion. It's just the courage to tell someone, "I made this."
It took me 2 months to realize that. You can do it starting today.
Lily (@bokuwalily) — Indie developer. Making iOS apps and web services in tandem with AI.
