Goal: learn marketing well enough to take an app from "built" to "paying users", with ~5 focused hours/week next to a full-time job.
The core rule: marketing is learned by running experiments on a real product, not by reading. Reading is capped at ~20% of your time. Every week ends with numbers written down.
The five layers
Work top to bottom. A failure at a higher layer cannot be fixed at a lower one — no channel fixes a product nobody urgently wants.
1
Market — Does a specific group have a painful, frequent, budgeted problem? Demand exists before the product. Test: are they already paying for worse solutions or hacking something together?
2
Positioning — For whom exactly, instead of what alternative, and why obviously better for them? Generic positioning ("AI meal planner") = invisible. Narrow positioning = findable and referable.
3
Channel — Where do these people already gather, and which channel matches the product's economics? A $5/mo consumer app can't afford channels a $500/mo B2B tool can. Pick ONE channel, go deep for 6 weeks.
4
Conversion — Stranger → visitor → trial → payer. Landing page, onboarding, paywall, pricing. Funnel engineering; devs are good at it once they measure.
5
Retention — Why do they come back and keep paying? Consumer apps live or die here. Retention problems masquerade as marketing problems — check retention before buying traffic.
Meta-rule: treat marketing like debugging. Hypothesis → smallest experiment → measure → keep or kill. Most experiments fail; that's the process working.
12-week plan
Weeks 1–2: Foundations + positioning
Week 3: Pick ONE app
Week 4: Instrument the funnel
Weeks 5–10: One-channel sprint (6 weeks)
Weeks 11–12: Conversion pass + verdict
Resource shortlist
Books (in order):
- The Mom Test — Fitzpatrick (validation / user conversations)
- Obviously Awesome — Dunford (positioning)
- Traction — Weinberg & Mares (channel selection; Bullseye framework chapters, skim the rest)
- Hooked — Eyal (retention loops, when you get there)
- The SaaS Playbook — Rob Walling (if/when you do B2B SaaS)
Ongoing (pick 2, unsubscribe from the rest): Sub Club podcast (RevenueCat — the single best resource for consumer subscription apps) · MicroConf YouTube / Startups for the Rest of Us (bootstrapped SaaS) · Lenny's Podcast (growth) · Indie Hackers + the X "app growth" scene (e.g. Thomas Petit, Phil Carter).
Tools to know exist: RevenueCat (subscription infra + benchmarks), Superwall/Adapty (paywall A/B tests), AppFigures/Astro (ASO keywords), Apple Search Ads, PostHog/Plausible (web analytics).
Weekly log
30 minutes at the end of each week. Numbers first, then one thing learned, one thing to change.
Positioning worksheet — AI meal planner (iOS)
The honest starting point: "AI meal planner" is one of the most crowded categories on the App Store. Positioned generically, this app is invisible no matter how good the marketing execution is. The way in is a narrow wedge: a specific person with a specific constraint that generic planners handle badly.
Wedge examples (illustrative — pick from real user conversations, not this list):
- GLP-1 (Ozempic/Wegovy) users needing high protein at low volume — huge, growing, underserved, urgent
- Families with picky kids — plan one dinner everyone eats
- A specific country: integrate local grocery chains' actual products and prices — generic US-centric planners can't compete locally
- Medical diets: diabetes, PCOS, IBS/low-FODMAP — urgent, searched-for, willing to pay
- Budget-first: "feed a family of 4 for under X/week", driven by this week's supermarket offers
Worksheet — this IS the marketing work
One person. Age, situation, the moment they go looking for an app.
The competing alternative — often a notes app, ChatGPT, or a recipe site, not another planner app.
"For [who], [app] is the [category] that [key difference], unlike [alternative]."
The word-of-mouth trigger — be concrete.
Channel notes for this category
- ASO first. Meal planning is search-driven — people type their problem into the App Store. Keyword-target the wedge ("glp-1 meal plan", "picky eater dinner"), not "meal planner" (unwinnable). Tools: AppFigures/Astro.
- Short-form video is the proven growth channel: "what I eat in a day", grocery hauls, before/after, "I let AI plan my week" — demoable and native to TikTok/Reels/Shorts.
- Web-to-app quiz funnel (the Noom/BetterMe playbook) once there's paid budget: quiz → personalized plan preview → paywall → install. Converts far better than cold traffic to the App Store.
- Apple Search Ads on wedge + competitor keywords — cheap to test at $10–20/day once the store page converts.
Retention warning: meal planners have notoriously bad week-4 retention — people plan enthusiastically for two weeks and quit. The retention hook is the weekly ritual: plan Sunday → grocery list → cook. If week-4 retention is bad, fix that before spending anything on acquisition.
Funnel benchmarks (rough; sanity-check against RevenueCat's current report)
| Step | Decent |
|---|---|
| Store page view → install | ~25–35% |
| Install → trial start (hard paywall in onboarding) | ~5–10% |
| Trial → paid | ~30–40% |
If your numbers are wildly below these, the problem is positioning/onboarding/paywall — not traffic volume.
Positioning worksheet — live interview assistant (desktop)
The honest starting point: a hot, controversial, high-willingness-to-pay category (Cluely, Interview Coder, Final Round AI). The pain is "hair on fire": job seekers in interview season will pay $50–100/mo without blinking, because the payoff is a salary.
Structural realities to design around:
- Churn is built in. People stop paying the moment they get a job. That's fine — price for it (high monthly, per-interview credits, or a "job search season pass"). Don't chase long LTV that can't exist; capture value fast and make leavers into referrers — "got the job" is the best possible word of mouth.
- A positioning fork you must consciously choose:
- "Real-time answer feed" (the cheating frame): maximally viral, controversy does the marketing for you (Cluely's playbook) — but invites platform risk, employer backlash, and works best with a personal brand fronting it.
- "Practice & coaching copilot" (the prep frame): mock interviews, feedback, company-specific prep, live nudges framed as coaching. Broader market, safer, SEO-friendly — but less inherently viral.
- Middle paths exist (live structure prompts rather than answers; post-interview debriefs). Pick deliberately; every channel and copy decision flows from this.
Worksheet
New-grad SWE? Career switcher? Non-native English speaker interviewing in English — a strong underserved wedge? Sales candidates?
ChatGPT in a second window, Glassdoor questions, human coaches at $150+/session — anchor pricing against the coach, not against apps.
Usually: interview scheduled, 2–7 days out, mild panic. Marketing must intercept that moment.
"For [who], [app] is the [category] that [difference], unlike [alternative]."
Monthly vs credits vs season pass — write down one to test.
Channel notes for this category
- Short-form video demos. The product is inherently demoable and provocative — a screen recording of it working during a mock call is a scroll-stopper. This category grew almost entirely on TikTok/X/Shorts. 3–5 clips/week, hooks first.
- SEO long-tail fits the prep frame: "amazon behavioral interview questions", "tell me about yourself software engineer", per-company/per-role prep guides. Compounding, high-intent. 2 articles/week for 6 months builds a real asset.
- Reddit/Discord job-seeker communities (r/cscareerquestions, r/jobs, bootcamp Discords): only works as genuine helpfulness with an occasional mention; blatant promo gets nuked.
- Affiliates: mock-interview and career-coach YouTubers/TikTokers, rev-share. Their audience is exactly the buying moment.
- Timing: demand spikes with hiring seasons (Sept–Nov, Jan–Mar) and layoff news cycles. Plan pushes around them.
Why this app might be the one to focus on: versus the meal planner — dramatically higher willingness to pay, more urgent pain, less crowded (still early), clearer channels, and desktop distribution means no App Store review gatekeeping (relevant for the edgier positioning). The case against: built-in churn and the ethical/brand fork. Score both honestly in week 3.