Hi all, Last week I posted here asking for help. I built my first app (Finelly, a fun app for friend groups with that one friend who's always late), spent about $500 on ads across Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok and X, and got hundreds of installs but almost no real users. The response was amazing: dozens of detailed comments and DMs. I want to give something back by summarizing what I learned, in case it helps someone in the same spot. 1. Install bidding buys installs, event bidding buys users. My Google campaign optimized for installs, so it found the cheapest installers, not interested people. CPI was $0.35, but the real cost per registration was around $19. Always measure what you actually care about. 2. A suspiciously good CTR is a warning, not a win. 12.5% CTR plus a 20% invalid traffic refund are the same story: people tapping ads by accident in games, trying to hit the close button. 3. Small budgets can't feed event optimization. Event optimization needs a steady flow of conversions to learn. At $10–15 per day, the advice was to optimize for an intermediate event first. To pick it: volume first, correlation second. 4. Don't put a wall on the first screen. You could use my app without an account, but the first screen looked like a registration form. The advice: let people in first and ask them to sign up after the "aha" moment. 5. Your store listing might be the real leak. On Apple Search Ads, only 1 in 10 taps turned into an install. Feedback: my icon was too complex, and my screenshots looked like PowerPoint slides. One idea per screenshot, with the app as the hero. 6. Paid social ≠ users. TikTok and Meta got me views and followers (many of them likely bots), but zero app activity. Organic content aimed at the right niche beats paid reach aimed at nobody. 7. Group apps need groups. People who downloaded alone had no one to use it with. The best suggestion: skip the ads and get real friend groups to use it at their next gathering, then watch what happens. What I'm doing next: redesigning the icon and screenshots, making the no-account option obvious, switching to an intermediate-event campaign, and getting real groups to test it. Thanks to everyone who took the time to help. And if you've been through this, what did I miss?   submitted by   /u/ankumo87 [link]   [comments]