u/AgreeableCress446

I've been doing my budgeting a little differently lately, and I'm curious if anyone else does something similar.

For years, I tracked my fixed expenses in Excel - rent, insurance, subscriptions, groceries, etc. Basically the usual monthly overview of where the money goes.

But at some point I started tracking individual events instead.

Things like:

• vacations
• weekend trips
• wedding
• birthdays
• moving
• bigger projects or purchases

Instead of just having a category like “travel,” I create an overview for each event and track everything that belongs to it.

And I mean everything. For a vacation, that might include transportation, accommodation, restaurants, activities, little purchases along the way, etc.

I've been doing this for a while now and something interesting happened: I've started building my own little catalogue of event costs.

After a few vacations, I can look back and see what previous trips actually cost me. Same with weddings, family events, moving, and so on. When something similar comes up again, I have a much better idea of what budget I should expect.

It also answers a question that a normal monthly budget doesn't really answer:

“How much did this thing actually cost me?”

A monthly budget tells me what my normal life costs. Event-based tracking tells me what it costs when something out of the ordinary happens.

It has also made budgeting for future events much easier because I can use previous events as a reference instead of guessing.

I saw a recent post here about budgeting from CSV exports rather than using automatic bank syncing, and it got me thinking about how differently people approach budgeting in general.

So I'm curious: does anyone else budget around events/projects rather than only monthly categories?

I'd love to know if I'm accidentally building a very nerdy personal “event cost database” that other people are doing too. 😄

I've been working on ASO for my mobile app for a while now, trying to figure out how much keyword rankings actually matter.

For one particular keyword, I managed to push my app all the way up to around #128.

Honestly, that didn't sound very impressive to me.

I assumed I'd need to be somewhere near the top 10 before it would make any meaningful difference.

But then something changed.

I started getting new users from the App Store almost every day.

Nothing crazy. No huge spike in downloads.

Just a slow, steady stream of new users finding the app organically.

And that's when it clicked for me: ASO rankings matter even when you're nowhere near the top.

Getting to #128 for one keyword is already bringing people in. Now I'm really curious what happens if I can push it into the top 100, top 50, or eventually even higher.

It's another small win, but seeing users discover the app without me having to actively promote it feels huge.

Now back to climbing those rankings.

I've been iterating on my mobile app with a big focus on increasing retention and reducing churn. One area I knew was crucial was sharing budgets, but my initial invitation flow just didn't work.

Invitations got lost, users didn't really notice them, and the feature never had the impact I was hoping for.

So I went back to the drawing board and rebuilt the whole thing with one goal: make it dead simple.

And it finally worked!

One of my new users successfully used the new invitation flow and invited someone else which means 2 users joined because of this feature.

It's a small number, but honestly, it feels huge.

There's something incredibly satisfying about seeing a feature you've designed actually work the way you intended, especially when it directly results in new users.

Now let's see if I can keep iterating and turn these small wins into something bigger.

EDIT: Fix format

I've been building on my app for more than a year now and launch several months ago on AppSotre. Conversion rate (ca. 5%) isn't that bad, however I only got 20 downloads.

Now I want to start marketing and am interested in AppStore ads. Do you know any good resources to start with as I am totally new to ads?