u/HaloDayi23 — reddlx

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking through this problem lately and wanted to get some outside perspective.

I built a small Android app for tracking TV shows upcoming episodes, air dates, reminders. Pretty niche, pretty simple. It's live but barely anyone knows it exists.

I have no marketing budget and no audience. So I've been trying to figure out where to even start.

Here's my current thinking and where I'm stuck:

App store search seems obvious but I have no idea how long it takes to get any traction there, or whether it's even realistic for a new app with no reviews
Short videos showing the problem the app solves feel promising but I've never made content before and don't know if that's a rabbit hole worth going down early
Niche communities (TV fan forums, subreddits) feel like the most direct path but I don't want to just spam people
SEO feels too slow for now

For those who've launched small consumer apps what would you actually test first with zero budget and zero existing audience?

Did anything work surprisingly well early on, or did you mostly just grind it out through communities?

Hey everyone,

A few months ago I got frustrated enough with losing track of TV shows that I decided to just build something myself. I follow way too many series across different platforms and kept missing episode releases.

So I built Next Episode Tracker and recently pushed it live on the Play Store for the first time.

What I learned shipping it:

Getting the notification timing right was harder than I expected — too early and people ignore it, too late and it's pointless
The "most followed shows" feature wasn't in my original plan but came from thinking about what would help new users know what to add first

What it does right now:

Follow shows and see upcoming episodes in one feed
Air date info and episode reminders
Search for shows to add
Notification history
See what shows others track most

Still very early. I'm trying to figure out what actually matters to real users versus what I assumed would matter.

Store listing: Google Play

If you track a lot of shows how do you currently manage it? Spreadsheet, notes app, just winging it?