How to make an iOS app with zero installs

And make that install count up to four with my mad marketing skills. State of indie iOS app development with no spending on Ads in 2020.

Disclaimer: I’m talking only about my own experience and experience I’ve got based on market research. It can be different five years ago, or two years from now. Of course, it’s fully subjective.

I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m sorry for my possible mistakes. Also, you are welcome to correct any of them.

Some day I’ve decided to make an iOS app as an indie developer and set it free on the App Store market. That is a fresh idea in 2020 when the Apple App Store has about almost 2,000,000 apps available for download (according to Statista) and with average 1,386 new apps per day (according to 42matters). To make it even more difficult to succeed I chose to make a notes application, maybe the most submitted app by newcomer iOS developers, after To-Do lists, of course. There was another reason for this: I don’t really like any popular available notes application on iOS, starting with Apple Notes with its rudimentary skeuomorphism “paperlike” texture and letterpress effect; Bear with its burger menu from 2013 and its overall UI design decisions; Evernote with its forced sync with free version limits; Microsoft OneNote with more than 200 Mb application size, account require and also strange UI and UX decisions; Google Keep, because everyone should like sticky notes, I suppose, also with this “pretty” unified google iOS sidebars. And of course, every user needs markdown support (I wonder how many iOS users even know what it is) and some kind of picture drawing. My thought was that maybe there is a place for another simple notes app, that really follows HIG and do not frustrate people like me with some weird and overblown UI/UX. It is not possible for an independent developer to compete with such huge companies in the first place, but there is always could be a small niche on such a broad iOS market, isn’t it?

So I’ve made an app. During the development phase a lot of the features were thrown away (it is a common technique) or for faster shipping reasons were moved for future releases. And the name “Nowt” was given, as a reference to “now tags”, lack of features and lightweight UI. However, tags were moved out for v0.1, are they even that convenient, after all? Unfortunately, the name “Nowt” was already taken, so I quickly switched to “Nowte”, not a big deal after all. Only a few weeks after I found that there was a dead startup with this exact name. Well, great minds think alike.

This application is a simple quick notes. But who needs another just simple notes? Kill feature of this app must have been converting note from text into the image with one tap, aiming at heavy social network users. A typical workflow looks like this:

1. Composing quick note
2. Tap on the preview button
3. Save the image from the text after preview
4. Share it as an image to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or any other platform.

Well, not a bad idea, as I thought, and from a developer perspective, it is easy to implement. Why don’t just use default Apple notes and screenshot, you may ask? And the answer is: you can. But this workflow is much quicker and you don’t need to press two buttons and then clip it after that. Also, I think that a lot of iOS users don’t use screenshots at all (and this based on nothing). There are some applications that support export to image, but that feature is often buried under the menus or paywall.

I chose a rather interesting monetization strategy. You can buy additional themes, except for default white and black. There is a brown theme for $69 as a reference to one fashion brand. And you can buy vGold to make letters golden as a reference to modern game in-app monetization techniques. And of course, there are Ads banners, that you can disable.

So here it is, Nowte app in all its glory and half-baked v0.1:

Notes list with beautiful round previews for inner images and note body screen.

The application was approved with a first try. Overall experience with app submission is much better these days. Review nowadays takes up to 24 hours and that is just amazing. I made quite a good description, mildly optimized for ASO, and start waiting for the first users to gather some feedback and use it for that lost and dying agile practices. But nobody came 😢.

Let’s start a marketing campaign then. Twitter and Instagram were chosen as the main focus on social networks for my app. The only way to get some attention on social networks without money on ads is to use hashtags and hope that someone will be interested enough to check out your app. So I load my marketing skills with creativity for maximum power. You can see that below. And this is one of the best examples because most of the posts I have deleted.

Some of that self-advertising gave their fruits but mostly don’t. As you can see I heavily used Emoji to connect with those Zoomers, you know. And I even got some likes. After almost twenty days of so-called marketing and after one application update statistics shows me rather a sad picture:

One of those downloads is mine for test purposes, so the title is not wrong. Four is four. But on the other hand, it is four users without a penny spent on advertising, isn’t that cool? Zero users came from App Store search (despite some studies saying that 65% of iOS applications discovered from search), even though my app is at least discoverable with some keywords in some of the countries.

So what did we learn at the end of the day and did we even learn anything? Who knows, maybe that creating notes app without markdown support and advertising is not the best idea in 2020, or maybe that without buying traffic and ads your app will drown and never be found in App Store if that was a secret to anyone. And I know that my app not that good (and you didn’t even saw its codebase), the market is harsh, it is not 2009, when you could have to attract users with a drinking beer app. Let everyone make their own conclusions. And thanks for your attention.

If you still want to check out my app, here is a link:

https://apps.apple.com/app/nowte/id1495689849

Twitter: @AppNowte

Coming up next: How I wrote a post with zero views.