I shipped an app that got 47 downloads and zero dollars in 90 days
I shipped an app that got 47 downloads and zero dollars in 90 days.
It was one of the better built things I have made. A pickleball score keeper. Fast, clean, no bugs worth mentioning, genuinely nicer than what was already there.
Almost nobody types the words it is named after into the App Store.
I shipped it partly to find out, and what I found out is that quality never got a turn. The store had no reason to show it to anyone, so almost nobody saw it, so nobody could like it or not like it. The product was never the variable under test.
That is the uncomfortable part for whoever funds the build. A launch into a category nobody searches does not fail loudly. It produces silence, and silence is easy to mistake for a marketing problem, which is how a dead category gets a second budget.
If a team is asking you to approve the next build, ask what the demand for the words looks like first. Checking takes an afternoon. Building takes a quarter, and the afternoon is the only one of the two that can save the quarter.
https://lnkd.in/e5qpu9He