What’s up, nerds? It’s me, your inner suit. We’re going to do that thing you always say you want to do: make money from your indie app.

If you listened to the last article and built an app in the right niche, you’re halfway there. Now, it’s time to sell it, which requires just two things:

Be where users are looking for you

Some of that ‘marketing’ stuff you’ve heard so much about

We won’t be doing any programming today. Instead, we’ll be fixing your metadata, Photoshopping some tight screenshots, and tweeting dank memes. Let’s synergize our core competencies and get to work.

Rule 1: No cleverness

Were you so inspired by all those successful photo collage apps that you went and made your very own? Good job!

Here are your new brand guidelines:

Your app should be named “Photo Collage”

Your icon should be a tiny photo collage

Your screenshots should show collages of photos

Your description should be about photographs and the collaging thereof

You’re trying to look like the default choice for a popular organic search term, not win a Clio. Your app’s brand and assets should be intelligible and direct. That means a boring name and a straightforward icon.

Don’t get cute. Your potential users don’t want to have an inside joke explained to them, they just want to know that your app solves their problem.

Rule 2: Be in the right place

If you’re convinced that your competition is succeeding organically (no giant paid acquisition campaigns, no ‘big brother’ app or website pushing traffic to it, etc.), then they must be capturing app store search traffic. You need to reverse-engineer how so that you can appear alongside them.

Start by making a list of potential search terms that might drive traffic in your niche (like “collage maker”, “photo collage”, “collage app”). Check the results of these searches. If the niche leader appears near the top of the results, add that keyword to your own listing. (If you can’t find any keywords like this, revisit your assumption that your competition is succeeding organically.)

There is no guarantee that these keywords are what’s boosting your competition — correlation is not causation — but it’s a good guess.

Next, go deep into your competitors’ reviews. Here you can see, in their own words, how customers describe your niche. You couldn’t pay for this quality of user research! Your competitor’s reviews are a goldmine for keywords and customer insights: you might check out a photo collage app and find customers leaving reviews with novel phrases you wouldn’t have guessed (like ‘greeting cards’, ‘photo montage’, and ‘brochure’).

These two strategies will yield a list that you should use in your keywords field, and also liberally in your app’s description and feature list.

Rule 3: Look good

If you want your app to sell, it needs to look good. Not “I did all the required fields and it passed the app store’s review” good, but actually, objectively good.

iOS and macOS developers were apparently born knowing this. Android developers seem to have caught on. Microsoft Store developers are, well, hopefully reading this.

You don’t need design sense, you just need diligence; making your app’s listing look good takes more effort than skill. Here’s your checklist:

Provide every art asset. Each art asset is another opportunity to show off your app, for free. Don’t leave optional fields blank.

Each art asset is another opportunity to show off your app, for free. Don’t leave optional fields blank. Consider the usage of your icons. Some app stores use a different icon in the search results than on the product listing page. Most use different icons for the installed app than the app’s store listing. Optimize each icon for its purpose. Don’t blindly copy-and-paste.

Some app stores use a different icon in the search results than on the product listing page. Most use different icons for the installed app than the app’s store listing. Optimize each icon for its purpose. Don’t blindly copy-and-paste. Make realistic screenshots. Don’t half-ass your app’s screenshots with “Lorem Ipsum” or obviously-fake data. Make it real and inspiring, so your prospects can actually see themselves using your app.

Don’t half-ass your app’s screenshots with “Lorem Ipsum” or obviously-fake data. Make it real and inspiring, so your prospects can actually see themselves using your app. Update, update, update. Metadata requirements and opportunities change regularly in every app store. Apps that keep their metadata updated will have double or triple the install rate of their lazier competitors.

Rule 4: Get paid

If your app is available for free, it has a funnel. A funnel is the list of steps you need to lead a user through in order to get them to some kind of desired outcome (like paying you). It’s called a ‘funnel’ because as you get further down, it becomes harder and harder to drag users to the next step.

Your app’s funnel is like Drake’s Equation for estimating the odds of whether there’s intelligent life in your developer account. Do you know yours well enough to bet your business on it?

Unless you have an active strategy for converting your free users into paid users, stop it with your month-long free trials, your IAPs that only gate 1% of your user base, or your subscription that only 0.1% of your users will ever buy.