On paid ads – I’ve also noticed indie devs often dismiss them. It just takes time (and some money) to find what works for your product. You've got to keep experimenting until something works and when it works, double down on it. I've had success with both search ads and display ads.
If your product converts well, your ads will usually work in your favor. Although, designing a good ad creative is like building a product: it needs a clear value and a strong CTA to drive clicks.
Meta ads, for example, has been my top source of users for one of my apps[1].
[1] Unwind - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwind-daily-breathwork/id1470...
I agree, I think it's mainly due to indie devs being cash poor and time rich at the beginning of the product's lifecycle, so they do more organic marketing (or none at all, lol) but then they never learn to invest in ads. There really should be an ads course for indie devs, or something to that effect. I learned ads due to running an entirely different business and it's pretty successful, but I've only scratched the surface for using ads in typical SaaS products.
Some great suggestions in the article. The best ones I think are to stay focused and not jump to another idea and to focus on marketing.
Both are hard for folks who enjoy building. If you want to make money you have to grow in the opposite direction and grind.
It's been a huge challenge for me, because I find so much joy in building stuff. I didn't discuss it in the article, but one thing that's helped me is to just give myself a "free roaming" day here and there to just open up Xcode and work on some idea that I know won't ship. Just gives me that dopamine hit though, and sometimes a lot of that code finds itself in Elite Hoops.
I'm getting ready to launch an iOS app in the next couple of weeks, and this is gold! Does anyone have a perspective on Apple Search Ads vs Meta vs TikTok? I'm wondering what's worth the squeeze.
I've done both:
- ASA was awesome in the beginning for me, but a competitor came out and way outbid me. So I don't use them currently. - Meta will take time to figure out, but once it did - it has been critical for me. For example, at the start I had my targeting age around 20-60 year old, something like that. But I found out that 20-25 year olds aren't really serious basketball coaches yet, and the algo serves ads to them like crazy because they are super cheap. Basically, low intent users. Changing my age range to 25+ was like a magic switch that made me ads better overnight. Stuff like that is why you need a few months to figure it out, and you can do that without spending a toooon of money, but you do need to spend some money. Hope that helps.
For crowded markets, search ads are very expensive so display ads on Meta/TikTok are cheaper. You should do some research on what's the competition for keywords you're targeting. If there's a lot of competition, then go with Meta, otherwise go with ASA or Google Search Ads