The App Marketing & Growth Playbook

Most app marketing advice is written for teams with budgets.
This playbook is written for the opposite — one person, one app, and a hard limit on time and money.
If you’ve shipped an app and watched it sit at a few dozen installs, this is the system that gets you unstuck. Not another course. Not a Twitter thread. A complete, channel-by-channel growth operating system you can actually run alone — in about 10 hours a week.
What’s inside — 12 chapters, 37 pages

• The Retention Gate — the four numbers that decide whether your app is ready for growth. Spend on ads before these turn green and you’re burning money into a leaking bucket.
• App Store Optimisation, element by element — title, screenshots, description, icon — with an experiment protocol you repeat every month.
• The Two-Channel Rule — seven marketing channels ranked by solo-dev ROI, and why spreading across six is the classic solo-founder failure.
• A 30-Day Content Calendar — four pillars, repeatable monthly skeleton, and a hook library that actually works.
• The Budget Ladder — from $0 to self-funding, stage by stage. The first real dollar of ad spend doesn’t arrive until Week 10.
• Six Growth Loops you can ship as the developer — not buy as a marketer. This is the solo dev’s biggest structural advantage.
• Push Notification Strategy that builds habit instead of resentment.
• Monetisation Sequencing that waits for retention — or you poison your own reviews.
• A One-Page Dashboard + a 10-hour weekly operating routine you execute without thinking.
• The 90-Day Action Plan — the plan you work from day one.

What this playbook is NOT

• ❌ A Twitter-thread’s worth of tips stretched into an ebook
• ❌ Growth-hack listicles with no system behind them
• ❌ Advice that assumes you have a team, an agency, or a seed round
• ❌ Theory without execution

What it IS

• ✅ A working system. Twelve chapters, each a checklist — not an essay.
• ✅ Channel-by-channel playbook ranked for solo developers specifically.
• ✅ Budget discipline — the first paid-ads dollar arrives at Week 10, only if retention has earned it.
• ✅ A routine you can repeat forever. The system transfers to every app you launch after.

Written for
Solo developers and indie founders who have shipped an app — or are about to — and want a professional marketing system without a professional marketing team.
If you’re building your tenth app, this gets you to 10K installs faster. If you’re building your first, it saves you the 18 months most indie devs lose learning this by failing.
The honest promise

90 days of this produces a working growth system, not guaranteed hockey-stick numbers. Solo app growth is 6–18 months of compounding. The system is what makes the compounding possible — and it transfers to every app you launch after.