I got thousands of downloads spending $0 on ads

Polygloss broke its previous record of downloads for the 5th month in a row now 🥰📈🚀🎉 It makes me so proud to see it taking off like this! Especially considering we haven't spent a single cent on ads for this and all of these downloads are organic (these since april I mean, I did try purchasing ads and sponsoring content with influencers before).

If you're learning a language and want to join in, check it out at https://polygloss.app The way it works is very simple: you pick an image and write a short message about it to another player. It's recommended for intermediate speakers (or very brave beginners).

Here's some data for the last 28 days:
📈 4319 downloads on Android & 506 downloads on iOS
💰 $465 on revenue, from which $67 is monthly recurring revenue and the rest came from the sales of lifetime licenses. For comparison, the month before the revenue was only $54.
✏️ 37,950 texts written by players. For comparison, there were 26,742 texts in July.
🔤 Using 77 languages
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 From which the top 1 is Welsh, followed by English and then French

So what did I do this August?

• Programmed new features, fixed lots of bugs and published a new version of the app.
• Added lifetime subscriptions to the app.
• Wrote a newsletter to our contact list (It has ~18K contacts among registered players and people who subscribed to it before the app was launched)
• Posted about it in different communities with relevant data. For example, when I noticed Welsh players had the highest average of texts per player, I posted about it in Welsh communities (FB & reddit), which resulted in the app taking off within those spaces. Specially crafted content behaves a lot better than randomly spamming places.
• Shared every win whenever I could both on my personal twitter (4.5k followers) and LinkedIn(1k followers), and on Polygloss' twitter & IG (2.3K & 1.2K followers).
• Interacted with every single feedback I got on twitter.
• I also made stickers and flyers that I spread across my neighborhood. That didn't really impact downloads at all, but it made me feel very good because the materials were pretty! It also means I had stickers to give as gifts and I added them to the package of the winners of the testimonial contest for our website.
• Kept mentoring a jr. developer who's now developing a python program to reprocess some of our data after she completed the update of our website's html & css in July.

What are my plans for September?

• Even though we have been somewhat successful without it so far, I do plan on spending some money on ads next month! I have some budget saved for this (~$800) and given the impact that the lifetime licenses made this month, I feel it's a great moment to go forward and try this.
• I also paid copywriters for 3 blog posts last month, and will start publishing them next month for some SEO.
• Keep mentoring the jr. developer.
• Do some more coding (would really like to add a feature to review texts in a spaced-repetition kind of way).
• Research into getting investment.
• Publish some of the data for open science research. The players can choose to donate their texts to science, and I really want to share the ones involving minority languages. It would be pretty cool to get a public grant for that, but so far I haven't found any to apply.
• Take more time off.

That's a lot of work, how do I keep afloat?

Yes, that's a lot of work, and Polygloss has 0 investors so far. The only money going into it came from my pocket (~1900 GBP) and an entrepreneurship prize from my university (3500 GBP). As you can see, so far I have not gotten any profit from this project. But it does seem like it is a pivotal moment now.

To pay my bills and stay afloat so far, I have been doing freelance work as a senior software engineer. The contracting gets me about $2000/month. This is a significant salary cut compared with the 6 figures/year I've once made in the past, but also I usually don't exceed 10h/week of contracting. Honestly even if I didn't have my own projects to pursue I can hardly see myself working full-time for others again, so this is a pretty sweet deal for me given my needs.

I do have some offers of investment from friends and acquaintances, but I have not yet registered a company and am not sure if the amount offered (~35K) is worth this work yet. I would rather put off incorporating for as long as I can, but one reason to start considering investment is so I'm able formally hire and give a raise to the developer I'm mentoring.

What happened in April? It seems things started taking off from there

Lots of things! To list a few:

• It was the end of the tests of our iOS app and its launch into the app store (the Android app was made first).
• It was when the jr. developer started updating our website from the ugly placeholder that it was before.
• Among other places, I announced the launch on reddit and it got over 1K upvotes, generating a lot of downloads.
• The download spike generated lots of good reviews. Our app rating is 4.9 stars which is excellent compared with competitors.
• I paid a freelancer video producer to make us an app trailer, which I added to the play store page.

I'm not sure which of these factors influenced it, or if it was a combination, but after that the play store started recommending our app to users casually browsing it. As of today, the majority of our Android downloads comes from Google Play Explore. I have not been blessed by the algorithms like this on iOS yet, but the downloads there are also increasing as well as revenue.

Hope you enjoyed this post, happy to share and answer any questions about it!