The source is out there
Wow, October passed faster than September. Time runs faster when you have fun. Anyway, Stiva, the read-it-later app I'm building, sold for the first time, and the counter is at €40. It's amazing to sell something directly made by yourself and feel that you are bringing value to someone.
Where did they come from
My first thought was Reddit. A month earlier I had posted in a subreddit and given away ten premium codes. The codes couldn't turn into sales, since whoever used one already had premium, but the post put Stiva in front of a few thousand people. Stiva is at the beginning of its journey and ASO visibility isn't strong yet, so the obvious story was that the post led to the purchases. I went looking for proof.
The post, the comment and the ugly
In late September I posted in a showcase subreddit, with a link to the Play Store: 3,087 views in the first 48 hours, about 3.6k in total. The day after, the listing got 95 views from outside Play, against 0 to 4 a day the week before.
In the first days of October I scrolled past a post from someone asking for an offline app and mentioning Pocket, the read-it-later app Mozilla shut down in 2025. I wrote a comment without much ambition, with a link to Stiva's website, expecting a few dozen views. It got about 1,000. In the week after, at least 46 people came to the site from Reddit, where the week before there were none.
Think about it for a second. What would you give to have a few dozen people in a room, listening to you talk about something you built? Here it was about 1,000 views, from people who might actually need this kind of app. Sometimes we really take internet numbers for granted.
On October 1, two days before the comment, something sent people straight to the Play Store listing, not through the site, from many countries at once. I couldn't find what. It brought 31 installs that day and 9 the next, and it may have kept going in the days after, so I can't tell how many installs came from the comment.
Part of this blindness is my choice. The links I posted on Reddit carried no tracking parameters: it's a channel where a ban comes easily, and a link that looks like a campaign can turn a thread into a pile of negative comments. And Stiva sends usage statistics only for the people who opt in.
What do I take away from this experience? The best strategy is to do nothing and wait for a spike from a source I can't name: it brought more installs in one day than a showcase post or a specific discussion about offline apps.
The people who wrote to me
What I do have is what people told me. In October a few of them reached out: some by DM on Reddit, some by email, some in a review.
Stiva has few installs, so every one of those messages weighs a lot. Two requests came up: publish a Firefox extension, but also make the browser extensions on Stiva's website and in-app tag management easier to find. The extensions were linked in the site's main menu. To me that was obvious, because I was the one who put them there. To the people who wrote, it wasn't.
For the extensions I made a dedicated page on the site, put the links in the hero of the home page, and gave them more room inside the app. As for tags, an improvement is coming with the next release.
The price question from last month came out of a conversation too. I've started adapting prices by country, but it's still a work in progress. I need a method that isn't doing it by hand.
Some people paid for something I built, and I can start from this.
Any thoughts on what I wrote? Reply by email. I read everything.