Have tried splitwise and the like but I just cba to spend forever typing. For context, went travelling around Asia with friends and had to maintain an awful google sheet to not get lost.
Anyone found a solution where I can just dictate as I leave restaurant or maybe take photo of receipt?
53k of you saw my last post about how my iOS app went viral on Reddit. That post got 100+ upvotes and led to 2k+ downloads.
A few weeks later, I wanted to share what actually happened afterwards because I think people massively overestimate what “going viral” does for an app.
Before the post, we had around 30 weekly active users.
After it blew up:
At the time I genuinely thought we’d cracked it and growth would just compound through word of mouth.
A month later we’re at around 150 weekly active users.
So still 5x higher than before, which is great, but nowhere near what I imagined when the downloads were coming in.
I think the main thing I misunderstood was high-intent vs low-intent users.
If someone finds your app while actively searching for a solution, retention is usually pretty solid because they already have the problem your app solves.
But if someone downloads your app because they randomly saw it featured somewhere, retention can be rough.
Most of our viral traffic actually came from being featured in a Hong Kong tech magazine, not Reddit itself. That brought in a lot of people interested in tech/apps generally, but not necessarily people looking for a social gym app.
600 people who downloaded it never even opened it once lol.
One unexpected upside though: App Store rankings/visibility definitely improved after the spike. We now get ~30 organic downloads a week with basically zero marketing.
Anyway, thought this might be helpful for other indie devs because viral moments look way more life-changing from the outside than they usually are.
(here's the app if you want to check it out)