I cold emailed a blogger that I learnt a lot from and showed him my app. He liked it, mentioned it, asked a friend with lots of followers to link it. Then it spread by word of mouth, and a few weeks later I had 1000 beta testers.
Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.
If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.
If AI could already do jobs better than a human, then people would just use AIs instead of hiring people. It looks like we are getting there, slowly, but right now there are very few jobs that could be done by AIs.
I can't think of a single person that I know that has a job that could be replaced by an AI today.
Signal has so many footguns that I stopped recommending it. I know more than one person who lost all their messages and pictures when they switched phones.
I think that the vast majority of people do not like calling contractors for quotes. You have to spend time on the phone, wait for someone to show up at your house, wait two weeks, call them a bunch of times to ask when they will have time to send a quote, only to find out the cost is about 3 times what you expected, and the quote doesn't include a few things you specifically asked for.
If a company has a website where I can see an estimated price before I call, that's a huge advantage.
I used to do something like that when I was developing b&w photos in my room. I changed the color balance somehow to block green and blue to have a red only display. This way I could use a timer app on the computer for developing photos. (I also had to turn the brightness of the monitor down pretty far, just the red software filter apparently wasn't enough)
It's important to consider when you compare with App Stores or resellers that charge a flat fee of 15%-30%.
Another important factor that is missing is currency exchange rates. I don't know how Stripe handles them, but they always resulted in mysteriously missing money in my experience.
Bicycle lanes in many cities are close to unusable.
For example:
- they are right next to parked cars and you can't ride on them without constant fear of getting doored
- they abruptly stop and there is no obvious place where to continue riding
- cars park on the bicycle lanes
- bicycle lanes go right next to crowded bus stops and there are so many people that it's impossible to ride
- crossings are designed in such a way that you need to wait for three (!) traffic lights to cross a single road, leading to a waiting time of at least 3 minutes
There are only a handful of roads with usable bicycle lanes in my city. And guess what: In places where bicycle lanes are usable, people use them. Nobody rides a bicycle on the road if there is a usable alternative.
Converting beta testers to paid users took a long time, but eventually it became a profitable business.
If you make something people want, it's easy and you need very little marketing.