I built a free, privacy-first sobriety app. 1,500 visitors in 2 months, under 20 signups. Where am I losing people?
Hey all. I'm a solo, self-taught dev (Army vet, been coding since the Red Hat 5.2 days), and for the past few months I've been building **Quietly Sober**, a recovery app built around one idea: *recovery doesn't have to happen alone.* Its mascot is a turtle named Tucker. 🐢
**What it does:**
- Sobriety milestone tracker
- Daily recovery reflections
- Community boards (general, 12-step, and non-12-step)
- Sponsor Finder (swipeable cards)
- Meeting list with attendance verification
It's free. There's an optional $4.99/mo add-on for AI daily reflections, which helps keep everything else free. It's live on iPhone/iPad, Windows, and the web, built in Flutter.
**Privacy was the #1 design rule.** Sponsor messages are encrypted at rest, nothing is shared without consent, and there's no social feed showing your recovery to the world. People in recovery value anonymity, so the goal is support without exposure: private, but not alone.
**The honest numbers after ~2 months:**
- ~1,500 website visitors
- Under 20 accounts
- 0 paid subscriptions
So traffic isn't the problem. Conversion is. I posted in 9 sobriety Facebook groups and got zero traction, which in hindsight makes sense: people in recovery don't want to be *seen* engaging with a recovery app in public.
**Where I'd love your feedback:**
Does the homepage make it clear what this is, and that it's private? https://www.quietlysober.com
Would anything stop you from signing up?
If you've built for a sensitive niche (health, recovery, mental health), how did you reach people who search privately but avoid public groups?
Brutal honesty welcome. I'd rather fix the leak than keep pouring traffic into it.