Getting customers · 8 min read
How to market an app
Start with the page, not the channel. Make sure a stranger can tell what your app does in three seconds, then go and be useful in the specific places your problem gets discussed. Everything else — SEO, ads, launches — is for later.
The app works. You paid for the domain, fixed the mobile layout, and wrote the onboarding email nobody has received. Analytics shows four visitors, three of which were you.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: building had instructions. There was a docs page, a Stack Overflow answer, a model that would write the migration for you. Marketing has none of that. It has a thousand posts saying “build in public” and none saying what to do on Tuesday.
First: fix the page, before you fill it
Before sending anyone anywhere, read your own homepage as a stranger with three seconds and no context. Does it say what breaks and what you fix? Or does it say something like “the modern platform for teams”?
Every visit you generate gets multiplied by whatever that page already does. If it converts at zero, a brilliant forum reply produces nothing — and worse, you conclude the forum doesn’t work and go somewhere else.
If nobody understands the homepage, buying more traffic just lets more people misunderstand it.
Second: stop looking for the channel
The instinct is to pick one. SEO, or X, or Reddit, or ads. Wrong first question, and it burns months.
The right one is: who has this problem badly enough to go looking for a fix? Not who might like your app. Who is, right now, annoyed enough to type something into a search box or complain about it somewhere public.
People don’t search for your category
This is the distinction that decides everything. Someone building a tool for golf societies will spend weeks chasing “golf society management software” — a phrase used almost exclusively by competitors. Meanwhile, society organisers are posting every week about losing an evening to a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group full of scores.
Those are the same people. Only one group is findable, and it isn’t the one using your category name.
Third: be useful before you’re relevant
The fastest way to burn a community is to reply with a pitch. People smell it instantly, moderators ban for it, and you get roughly one shot per place.
The reply that works answers the question properly — genuinely, in detail, as though you had no product — and then mentions what you built in one sentence at the end, where it’s relevant.
A test worth applying: if you’d be happy to post the reply with your product name removed, and it would still be a good comment, post it. If removing the name makes it pointless, don’t.
What to skip in month one
- App store optimisation, if you have no installs to optimise. ASO ranks what already has signal.
- A launch. One non-repeatable spike, aimed at a page with no evidence anyone has used this. You get one.
- Paid ads. Paying to test an unvalidated page.
- An SEO content plan. Six-month payback on a this-month problem.
- Another feature. You already know.
The bit that actually compounds
Write down what you did and what it produced. Visits, signups, customers, or nothing. Nothing is a result too, and it’s the one most founders throw away.
Do that for a month and you’ll know something no article can tell you: which channel works for your app. That’s the point at which marketing stops being guesswork.
Users or customers?
Worth being clear which you’re chasing — the playbooks differ more than people expect. Getting first users is a volume-and-habit problem; getting first paying customers is a value-and-trust problem. Confusing the two is how founders end up with a thousand signups and no revenue.