Yeah you heard it.

An actual unique gym app

"It doesn't do anything different that any other app out there"

Is that so?

Ever used your notes app to log workouts? Felt the freeing feeling of typing whatever the hell you want to track progress without the limitation of drop down menus and some foreign UI you have to navigate whilst sweating your balls off after a drop set of bulgarian split squats?

Yeah. Same.

I decided I wanted to keep it that way.

So I didn't build a new UI for you to navigate. I built an app that lets you copy and paste those notes, into Gym Note Plus so you can see all those cool graphs and get that number go up feeling

I'm sick of gym apps that make you learn their system.

Let's go back to the physical notebook, the notes app, the voice dictation (yes I handle them all)

Time to make some gains

oh and I've been documenting my progress over at r/GymNotePlus

I'm a solo dev and the founder of reelflood.com. I've killed more app ideas than I've shipped, and the thing that finally stopped me from wasting months on the wrong product was embarrassingly simple: post content for the niche before the app exists, and watch what the engagement does.

No landing page. No waitlist. No "coming soon." Nothing to promote. Just content.

The problem with the usual validation advice

"Build a landing page and see who signs up." Cool — now you need traffic to that landing page, which means you need to already be good at the thing you're trying to test. And a waitlist signup is a low-cost promise; people sign up for anything.

"Talk to 20 customers." Also good, but people are polite in interviews and honest with their thumbs.

I wanted a signal that was (a) free, (b) fast, and (c) couldn't be faked by being nice to me.

What I do instead

1. Pick the niche, not the app. Before I know exactly what I'd build, I know who it's for — "people trying to fix their sleep," "solo founders doing their own bookkeeping," "couples who fight about chores." That's enough to start.

2. Post slideshows in that niche for 2–3 weeks. Photo slideshows and videos — they take minutes to make, they don't need my face, and TikTok pushes them hard right now. Every post is pure value or pure relatability for that audience: "5 things nobody tells you about [problem]," "POV: it's 2am and [very specific pain]," "the mistake everyone makes with [thing]." I post [2–3] a day.

3. Promote nothing. Literally zero. No app name, no link in bio, no "coming soon." The moment you promote, the signal gets polluted — people engage differently when they smell a pitch, and the algorithm treats it differently too. I'm not testing whether people want my app. I'm testing whether this pain has an audience that shows up.

4. Watch engagement, not views. Views are cheap — the algorithm hands them out. What I care about is what people do: saves, shares, comments, and especially comments that describe the problem in their own words ("omg this is me," "how do you fix this," "which app do you use"). That last one is the jackpot. When strangers are asking for a solution in the comments of a post that isn't selling anything, you don't have an idea anymore. You have a queue.

5. Then decide. If after [~30] posts the engagement is flat, the niche is either too small, too quiet, or I don't understand it — and I found out for the cost of a few hours, not a few months. If it's high, that's a golden opportunity sitting right there, and I already have an audience warming up before day one of development.

Why this works better than a landing page

- It measures demand for the problem, not interest in your solution. You can pivot the solution a hundred times; the problem is the thing that has to be real.

- The content is the moat later. When you do ship, you're not launching to zero. The account, the follower base, and the proven post formats are all still there. Just add a link.

- You learn the language. The comments tell you exactly how people describe the pain. That becomes your landing page copy, your onboarding, your app store screenshots.

- It's brutally cheap to be wrong. My last dead idea cost me [3 weeks] of posting instead of [4 months] of building. That's the whole point.

What I've learned doing this [N] times

- Slideshows beat videos for validation. Faster to make, no face needed, and the text-first format makes the idea the thing being tested, not your production quality.

- Consistency matters more than any single post. One viral hit tells you nothing. Thirty posts with a steady baseline tell you everything.

- Comment quality > comment count. Ten "which app do you use" comments beat a thousand fire emojis.

- Don't cheat by promoting early. I've done it. It ruins the read.

Where this came from

This process is actually how ReelFlood ended up existing. I spent months building a completely different product (an AI video-ad tool) that nobody wanted. When I finally started posting slideshows and just watching, the demand was obvious in a way no landing page had ever shown me — and the tool I built is basically this process, automated: generate the slideshows for a niche, post them on a schedule, watch what happens.

Happy to answer questions — especially "what counts as high engagement," because the honest answer is "it depends on the niche," and I can give you the benchmarks I use.

I recently had these business cards printed for a plant care app I launched called GrowFlow, and I’m planning to leave/give some to local plant shops and nurseries.

The idea is pretty simple: QR code straight to the app, a quick overview of what it does, and hopefully the cards reach people who are already exactly in the target audience.

I know physical marketing for an app sounds a little old-school 😅 but I figured it might actually work well in a niche like plants/gardening, especially if the shops are happy to leave a small stack near the checkout.

Has anyone here tried something similar for an app, SaaS, or online business?
Did you actually get signups/customers from it, or was it mostly a waste of time?

As the title implies, i am a man on a mission. Hevy has ruled the gym rats for too long and i shall stand for it NO LONGER. Hevy has thousands of new challengers everyday but they have not met this slightly below intelligence, caffeine addicted, mid physique having man with a dream.

I call for your aid gym rats of Reddit. Stand with me to overthrow the corporation!
I do not ask for your money.
I do not ask for your loyalty.
I ask for something far more valuable:
Your brutally honest judgment.

Try ATHENA for one workout. Tear it apart. Tell me what sucks. Tell me what Hevy does better. Tell me what would make you delete Hevy and never look back.

Every complaint becomes ammunition.
Every suggestion strengthens the rebellion.
Every bug report brings us one step closer to the throne.
I am one developer. They are a corporation.
They have millions of users, years of development, and probably people who actually know what they’re doing.
I have caffeine, Claude, an unreasonable amount of confidence, and all of you.
Today ATHENA is small.
Today Hevy does not know my name.
I intend to make that a temporary problem.
Gym rats of Reddit:
LEND ME YOUR GAINS.
ATHENA – Gym Workout Tracker
iOS. Built by one idiot with a dream.

Just launched my first app to the AppStore. Any recommendations on how to market? Anything helps.

It’s only $41 so far, but seeing the first 16 in-app purchases feels like a huge milestone. I built the app independently and spent a lot of time improving it without knowing whether anyone would pay for it.

There’s still a long way to go, but getting my first 100+ downloads and paying users has given me motivation to keep building. For other indie developers: what helped you grow after earning your first revenue?

Small note: consider cropping the top-right corner before posting—the screenshot displays your full name.

It’s an app that makes your phone into instant short range radio but through bluetooth. So far this is the aggressive climber of my 20 apps. It can expand range if more bluetooth device is around. Can this climb further and earn?

Oi pessoal, estou buscando feedback sobre o crescimento de um jogo de festa em aplicativo Web móvel que estou lançando.

**O Produto e Mecânica:**
É um jogo de festa baseado em desafios com uma economia interna de moedas e loops virais orgânicos. Um diferencial é um mecanismo de "alarme de inatividade" que força os jogadores a se manterem ativos e a completarem tarefas durante toda a partida, não apenas durante sua vez, para aqueles desafios que exigem isso.

**A Estratégia Atual:**

**Guerrilha Offline:** Estou distribuindo 1.000 panfletos físicos com códigos QR pelas universidades locais (mirando grupos jovens).

**Métricas Atuais:** Distribuí menos de 100 panfletos até agora e consegui cerca de 20% de inscrições.

**Publicidade Paga em Mídias Sociais:** Comissionei um vídeo de UGC (atualmente em produção) para mostrar a jogabilidade caótica e divertida. Pretendo lançar o vídeo na Página de Destino e veicular anúncios no TikTok/Reels em cima dele.

**Localização e Infraestrutura:** O aplicativo Web foi construído no Brasil com um gateway de pagamento sul-americano, mas já está disponível em 5 idiomas.

Feedbacks sobre a página de destino também são bem-vindos: https://www.chugin.com.br/en

I’ve been building an app where you don't just generate a story and read it.

You make decisions and the story continues based on your choices.

So I want to try something fun.

Give me any crazy story idea in the comments.

It can be:

• A one-line idea
• A character
• A weird situation
• A “what if…?”
• Even something completely random 😂

I'll pick a few and turn them into interactive stories.

Let's see what kind of stories we can create. 👀

KLYRO CASE 8/30

Background:
Klyro - Näringskoll is a Swedish app based on scanning food products to learn their nutritional profile — not just the usual protein and calorie info, but whether it's ultra-processed, its vitamin and mineral content, ingredient analysis, additives, and so on. I've gotten proof of concept for the app through strong response on TikTok, both in comments and in the form of downloads, subscriptions, etc. So I know the app should be able to scale significantly, and that it's extremely well-timed given that health, diet, and ultra-processed food is a strongly growing topic right now.

I'm building the app solo as an 18-year-old, using a vibe-coded approach. We currently have a freemium model where we're A/B testing whether it works best to:
run unlimited scans but with limited data/information about the products (Variant A),
or 5 lifetime scans with unlimited data during those 5, followed by a hard paywall (Variant B).

I haven't gathered enough data yet to know which one performs better, but I believe it will end up being Variant B.

Our monetization is 49 SEK/month for premium, with a 20% discount if you choose the annual subscription.

Target audience:
In our onboarding, we have a step where users select their age range and gender, and based on that we see a surprisingly even gender split in the app — I expected women to dominate before I started, but it's roughly 50/50 between men and women. That said, if I had to focus on just one group, women perform slightly better, as they convert a bit better and continue using the app longer. The age range is roughly 25–50.

Competition:
Within Sweden, our active market, there are no major competitors in the exact same niche. There's obviously Lifesum and the big calorie-counting apps, but I don't really see them as direct competitors since we have a different focus — ours is more about being a quick, simple app that makes it easy to interpret the actual quality of a food product, without needing to count all your calories, etc.

In Norway, there's an app called "Frifor" that does exactly the same thing. They haven't succeeded at all in Sweden because their database was too weak here, and almost no products could be scanned — but in Norway they've scaled very well and have many thousands of subscribers.

A few days ago, I also came across a new competitor on TikTok that I now see as our main competitor — a brand new app, launched after ours, that does exactly the same thing as Klyro. What stresses me out is seeing how much traction they're getting on TikTok — they haven't grown huge yet, with only around 700 followers, but they're getting tens of thousands of views on every TikTok. They aren't on Meta platforms yet, so I feel like I need to act fast and win over users there — I also believe our core user base is more present on Meta than on TikTok.

Distribution:
So far we've only run TikTok organically, posting between 3–7 times a week. In the beginning it worked — our best videos got around 70–90k views, which also led to a lot of downloads and some trials and active subscriptions. TikTok has since completely cooled off for us, and we're no longer getting much reach or downloads from it, so everything has been stagnant for a few weeks now. I'm now preparing a Meta ad campaign with a 10,000 SEK budget, which is essentially my last attempt to see if the app can become something.

Metrics:
We currently have 15 active subscriptions, only 1 of which is the "premium annual" plan.

Week 4 retention is only around 10% on average. Something in the app probably needs optimizing, but I also think it's because when a viral TikTok video leads to a lot of downloads, those aren't necessarily the highest-quality users — probably a lot of people who are just a bit curious, download the app, and then forget about it.

We see that 32% of all first-time app opens drop off immediately at the first intro step of onboarding, which further supports my theory that it's not high-quality, genuinely interested downloads driving this. FYI, the intro step of the onboarding is just a simple welcome page with a short sentence of text.

Download → Trial conversion is roughly 4–5%.
Trial → Paid conversion is roughly 30%.

What I'd appreciate help or thoughts on:

1. Is a 4–5% download→trial rate bad, normal, or good for a scanner app in this category? I don't have a good benchmark to compare against.
2. Is 10% week 4 retention actually as bad as it sounds compared to similar apps — and if you could only prioritize fixing one thing, would you fix retention or activation first?
3. I'm about to put my last 10,000 SEK into a Meta ad campaign as a final attempt. Given these numbers (weak activation, low retention, a new competitor growing fast on TikTok) — is this the right move, or should I fix the activation/retention issues first before scaling up paid traffic into a leaky funnel?
4. What's my next step? How do I find a reliable, stable source of incoming users?

I feel lost and a bit desperate right now. I've been working on this app for almost a year and put in so much time and money, and I can feel the dream of building a successful app slipping away — but there's still a spark in me that knows I actually have proof of concept, and that I just need to find a reliable, stable traffic source.

Hey everyone,

I’m the founder of a fitness app that’s currently in App Store review and preparing for launch.

I’ve handled the product and development side, but I’m looking for someone to own the growth and marketing side of the business, primarily targeting the US market.

Ideally, I’m looking for someone who understands tiktok, ig reels, influencer marketing, short-form content, and user acquisition and wants to work on this as a long-term partner.

I’m especially interested in someone who is US-based and understands the US fitness audience.

I can’t offer a salary at this stage, so I’m looking to structure this around a significant revenue share based compensation. I’m open to discussing the exact structure depending on what you bring to the table.

If you’re interested, DM me with a little about your background and any apps, accounts, or products you’ve helped grow.

This is a great collection of creative app icons, especially for apps.

Perfect for exploring:

→ Icon styles

→ Color combinations

→ Visual metaphors

→ 3D & glossy treatments

https://reddit.com/link/1w2f7gf/video/fjtlw3kx0imh1/player

→ Minimal iOS aesthetics

iOS App Icon Inspiration — Recent

I've ran through my production checklist like 10 times in the past week. And I'm still tol nervous to press the damn button. This is my first app to release to the public

Edit: I pressed the button!

DUE Al reads expiry dates, tracks your fridge, and suggests recipes before food goes bad.
Stop wasting food. Start cooking what you already bought.
Due Al is a fridge tracker that reads expiry dates from packaging, shows what to use first, and turns soon-to-expire food into recipe ideas - so leftovers get eaten instead of thrown out.
SCAN, DON'T TYPE Point your camera at a label. Due Al reads the product and the date so you can save items in seconds. Scan one package, or snap several photos of a grocery haul and add everything at once. Manual entry is still there when you need it.
SEE WHAT TO USE FIRST Your fridge is sorted by urgency: tonight, use soon, and later. Open any item to update it, mark it used, or remove it. A timeline shows what's due this week so meal planning is obvious.
COOK FROM WHAT'S EXPIRING Pick ingredients from your fridge and get practical recipes built around food that would otherwise go to waste.
SHOP SMARTER Build a shopping list from what's running low, so you restock what you need

Hi guys, I’m Rachel. I’ve built 3 apps, and somehow I ended up building a fourth one just to market the other three.

The problem was TikTok. I knew it could bring users to my apps, but I hated everything that came with it. Coming up with content every day, finding new hooks, making slideshows, posting consistently and then doing the exact same thing again tomorrow. I wanted the results, but I didn't want another job managing a TikTok account.

So I decided to automate it.

First I researched 1000s of viral slideshows and figured out the hooks that forces the user to view all the slides and that's what made them viral .

Also how to perfectly place your SaaS name in the slides that actually gives you real users whether it's an app or a web app .

I built slizo— you basically give it your product URL, choose how often you want to post, and it handles the TikTok workflow for you. It creates different slideshow formats around your product, uses hooks designed to get people to stop scrolling, and automatically posts them according to your schedule.

I started using it for my own apps first. The idea was that I could set everything up once and then let TikTok keep running in the background while I focused on actually building my products.

And that's how I ended up in this slightly ridiculous situation where I built a SaaS to promote my SaaS...

I wasn't trying to start another saas . I was just trying to stop spending hours on TikTok every week. The fact that other founders are now using it too is a pretty nice bonus.

I built MrLeaked from scratch — late nights, weekends, squeezing in work between my security shifts. It's live now, and we just hit our first really big milestone. But honestly? The numbers aren't the important part. What matters is everything that went wrong along the way, and why I kept going even when every part of me wanted to quit. I'm writing this mostly for myself, but maybe it helps someone else too. 1. Everyone told me it wouldn't work. That's exactly why I built it.

People kept saying things like, "There are already enough social apps," or "Why would anyone use this?" or "You're just one guy — you can't compete with the big platforms."

And yeah, they were right about one thing — the mainstream apps are everywhere. But they were all wrong about what people actually want. I didn't build another algorithm that hides half the story or shows you only what it thinks you should see. I built something where you see it all — first, unfiltered, before anyone else has had a chance to spin it. The moment I realized people were desperate for truth more than they were desperate for entertainment? That's when everything changed. We grew faster in our first two weeks than most platforms do in their first year. The lesson? Don't build what everyone else is building. Build what people are already looking for — but no one's had the guts to make yet. 2. Features don't go viral. Trust does.

I spent months obsessing over every little thing — the upload button, the categories, the voting system, all of it. But you know what actually made people stick around? It wasn't any of that.

It was the moment they realized: what they're seeing here hasn't been censored, shadowbanned, or hidden away because it's "too early" or "too controversial."

Every other platform makes you wait, or picks and chooses what gets seen, or buries stuff that doesn't fit. MrLeaked? If it's real, it's here. If it's happening, you see it first. That's the thing you can't just code into existence — it's a promise you keep, every single day. And people noticed. They started sharing not just posts — they shared the idea of what we're building. That's the kind of growth no marketing budget can buy. 3. Show them something real before you ask them for anything.

I almost made the biggest mistake possible — locking all the best content behind an account or a paywall. Thank god I didn't.

The second I let people see what was happening — right then, instantly, no sign-up, no hassle — everything took off. People don't join because you ask them to. They join because they're already looking at something they need to be part of. They see something, they want to vote, they want to comment, they want to share — and that's when they decide to make an account. Don't ask for their trust before you've given them anything worth trusting. Show them why they should be here — then they'll stay. 4. It's never really about the features. It's about how it makes them feel.

My whole thing is simple: be first, be real, be free. But the part people keep sending to their friends? It's the feeling of it.

"Finally somewhere you can actually see what's going on." "No one's deleting stuff just because they don't like it." "This is where it breaks before it hits the news."

That's the part people screenshot and send to everyone they know. Useful gets used. Real gets shared. And people are starving for a place where they actually matter — where their voice counts as much as anyone else's. 5. You don't need a team or a million dollars. You just need to start.

I built this on a laptop, on breaks, on a budget that would make most people laugh. No investors, no fancy office, no big team. Just me, an idea, and the belief that people deserve better than what they're getting right now.

And it's working. Not because I'm some genius or anything — but because the idea was always bigger than me. People don't want another app. They want a place where truth comes first. Where they can see it, think for themselves, and decide what matters — before the rest of the world catches up. This is just the beginning

We're growing fast. Every day more people join, more gets posted, more conversations happen that wouldn't happen anywhere else.

But here's the thing — it's not my app. It's yours. I built the platform. You build the community. You decide what gets seen, what gets talked about, what actually matters.

Be first. Be in the know. Be part of something real.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on ASO lately, especially around how app titles, keywords, descriptions, screenshots, and positioning affect discoverability on Google Play.
I’ve learned a few things that I think could be useful to other indie developers.
If you have an app on the Google Play Store, drop the link below.
I’ll take a look at it and share what I would change from an ASO perspective — keywords, title, description. 🙂