How to promote your app

Most app promotion advice is written by people selling ads. This isn't. Paid acquisition for a $5-to-$20 product almost never pays back early, and the free channels are slower but they compound.

Here's the order that actually works.

1. Make the product explainable in one line

Before any promotion: if you can't say what it does in a sentence a stranger understands, every channel below will underperform. Write the line, test it on someone who doesn't know what you've been building, and use that exact line everywhere — listings, launch posts, your own homepage.

2. Get listed everywhere permanent

Directories are the highest-leverage afternoon you'll spend. They're permanent, they're crawled, and they keep sending people long after launch week.

The directory submission list →

3. Launch once, properly

One launch-day platform, prepared in advance: assets ready, first comment written, people told the day before. Six half-hearted launches beat nothing but lose badly to one prepared launch.

Where to launch besides Product Hunt →

4. Be somewhere, consistently

Pick two communities where your users already are and show up as a person: answer questions, post what you're learning, mention the product when it's genuinely the answer. This is slow and it's the difference between a launch and a business.

• ◆Reddit — find the subreddit your users are in, read its rules, contribute for a while before you mention yourself.
• ◆Indie Hackers — build logs and honest numbers get read; announcements don't.
• ◆X / Bluesky / LinkedIn — pick the one where you'll actually post twice a week rather than all three.
• ◆Discord and Slack groups — smaller, warmer, more likely to produce actual users.

5. Free app promotion sites worth the time

"Free promotion site" usually means "a page with no visitors". These are the categories that aren't:

6. Write the pages people search for

Search is the only channel that grows while you sleep. You don't need a blog; you need three or four pages that answer exactly what someone types before they'd need your product. Comparison pages, "how do I do X" pages, and a page per real use case.

How to pick what to write

• ◆Write down the five sentences a user would type into Google right before finding you useful.
• ◆Search each one. If the results are thin, generic or ten years old, that's your page.
• ◆Answer the question completely on the page, including the part where your product isn't the answer.
• ◆Link the page from your homepage or nav so it isn't orphaned.

What not to bother with

• ◆Paid ads before you know a visitor is worth more than a click costs.
• ◆"Submit to 500 directories" services.
• ◆Press releases. Nobody reads them and journalists don't either.
• ◆Buying upvotes, reviews or followers.

The uncomfortable part

Promotion isn't a launch-week task; it's a habit. Two listings and one honest post a week beats a single heroic launch day every time, and it's much less painful.