How I Got My First Users For My Apps (14 Apps, Solo Dev, Profitable)
TL;DR
A solo developer shares the four customer acquisition strategies used across 14 apps over 5 years. Organic social media, TikTok live streaming, Reddit marketing, and cold outreach each suit different product types — consumer vs. B2B — with distinct trade-offs in scale, speed, and user intimacy. ---
Key Concepts
Organic social media marketing
tap to reveal ↩
Creating brand content on social platforms to drive app awareness without paid ads
TikTok live streaming
tap to reveal ↩
Going live to pitch a product or story in real time, optionally funneling viewers into a webinar or sale
Reddit marketing
tap to reveal ↩
Posting or commenting in relevant subreddits to tap into high-trust, organic communities and gain SEO benefits
Cold outreach
tap to reveal ↩
Direct DMs or emails to individual potential customers, especially effective for niche B2B tools
B2C vs. B2B fit
tap to reveal ↩
Consumer apps suit social media; niche B2B apps suit cold outreach due to smaller addressable audiences
Notes
§Organic Social Media (Primary Strategy)
- Most used strategy across his apps; leveraged existing content creation skills
- Built brand-new accounts per app, posted videos, and hoped for virality
- Works best when you already have content reps — expect ~100 posts before hitting a strong video
- Tip 1 — Copy ruthlessly early on: Find large accounts in your niche and replicate their formats; drop the ego about originality
- Tip 2 — Keep the product as the star: Don't chase views with content that doesn't feature the app; virality without product visibility is wasted
- Finding a format: Hardest part; requires experimentation — once one format works, milk it until exhausted
- Target audience: college students
- Hook: outrageous/salacious research paper title (e.g., "Which medical specialty cheats most?")
- Follow-up: "I'm too lazy to read this, so I uploaded it into my app..."
- Result: entertaining, viral-optimized, and naturally product-forward
§TikTok Live Streaming
- Used for an audio journaling app; scaled to ~$50/mo recurring
- Format: green screen background removed, replaced with an enticing text headline (e.g., "Ex-Google engineer made $200k building apps — ask me anything")
- Streamed 1–2 hours at a time; exhausting and not easily scalable
- Limitation: very time-intensive; effectiveness tied to personal fit with the product niche
- Stronger funnel model (observed from another creator): Live stream → webinar → high-ticket course sale
- Captures warm leads rather than converting cold viewers on the spot
§Reddit Marketing
- Reddit has uniquely strong organic community trust — users actively filter for Reddit results on Google
- Two benefits: direct user acquisition + SEO (threads rank on Google for "[topic] Reddit" searches
- Common tactic: find threads ranking for target keywords, comment with a product plug
- Major risk: subreddits heavily enforce "no self-promotion" rules; getting banned is common and permanent per account
- Recommends watching his separate video with a YC founder for deeper Reddit marketing tactics
§Cold Outreach (Current B2B Strategy)
- Used for Yorby — a B2B tool that lets career coaches create AI clones of themselves for student access
- Channels: Instagram and LinkedIn DMs targeting career coaches
- Unfair advantage used: existing social media presence in the career/corporate space — framed outreach as peer creator, not cold vendor
- Result at time of filming: 2–3 active beta users nearing paid conversion
- Key upside over social media: direct line to users enables fast feedback loops and relationship-building
- Key downside: no viral ceiling — growth is one conversation at a time
Actionable Takeaways
- Match acquisition strategy to product type: social media for B2C, cold outreach for niche B2B
- Before making content, spend time studying what's already going viral in your target niche — copy the format first, develop style later
- Always keep the product as the centerpiece of content; don't optimize for views at the expense of product visibility
- For TikTok live, pair it with a webinar funnel to improve cold-to-paid conversion rather than selling directly from the stream
- When doing Reddit marketing, engage authentically and carefully — read subreddit rules before posting to avoid permanent bans
- Use any existing audience or social credibility as an "unfair advantage" in cold outreach framing
- Expect a long ramp for organic social — budget for ~100 posts before finding a repeatable winning format
Quotes Worth Keeping
“
Your product has to be the star of the show. It can't just be some side character.
“
Once you find one specific format that works, you just milk it out like crazy until there's nothing left in it.
“
We had a lot of users but we had no user to reach out to ask for feedback — it was a very different relationship.