Distribution can be organic or paid.
The main organic channels are ASO, SEO, and social media. The main paid channels are advertising in all its forms and influencers.
Organic distribution is a long game.
You shouldn’t expect ASO to be some kind of magic button: results come gradually, and there may be no fireworks at all. The App Store doesn’t seem to give you any guaranteed launch boost either — at least I didn’t get one.
I’m still waiting to see any meaningful results from SEO. People usually talk in terms of months, often 4–6 months, before you can really start drawing conclusions.
Social media is a roulette game with a huge amount of testing. I haven’t won once yet, but I also don’t have much experience with it.
TikTok carousels turned out to be surprisingly interesting — for me, they get pretty decent reach compared with videos. Instagram has been the opposite so far: if you don’t have followers, carousels barely go anywhere, while videos at least get some exposure to new audiences.
Geography is another significant limitation. TikTok takes into account the country you’re posting from, your location, language, and other similar signals. If you’re sitting in Serbia but want your content to reach people in the US, doing that organically is noticeably harder. Or you can pay to boost the post. Maybe there are some gray-area ways around this that I don’t know about.
As for post boosts, my impression at this early stage is this: either you’re very talented and can consistently make content that the algorithm distributes on its own, or you pay for boosts. Otherwise, getting any meaningful reach is very difficult. I still haven’t figured out where exactly that talent threshold is — or maybe I just haven’t cracked it yet.
Threads didn’t work for me at all. Possibly because of the same locality issue. I haven’t tried Twitter/X yet; maybe it’s worth a shot.
With advertising, pricing tends to bring you back to product economics pretty quickly. If you want to consistently acquire users profitably, it helps to already have a proven business model and understand your unit economics. Especially in expensive markets like the US and EU.
The other option is to have enough funding to keep growing at a loss for a long time, but for a small business that’s usually not much of an option.
I haven’t tried influencers yet.
I haven’t launched on Product Hunt either. From what I’ve heard from people who have, it rarely changes the overall picture completely: you may get a nice short-term spike in traffic and downloads, and then things drop back to their usual level pretty quickly. But we’ll see.
Reddit is a real channel, but almost everyone recommends the same approach: go to communities where people have the problem you’re solving and simply help them. No self-promotion unless they specifically ask you to share more.
It hasn’t worked for me so far. Maybe there are niches where it works extremely well. Or maybe I’m simply doing something wrong.
My conclusion at this point is this: if you don’t already have your own distribution channel, don’t expect your app to somehow start getting reach on its own.
Especially if you’re in a highly competitive, crowded niche and your app isn’t so unusual that people naturally start spreading it for you.
Be prepared to dance on TikTok just to get at least some views and visits to your App Store page or landing page :)
Half joking, half not.
Have a good week. I’m off to dance.
