Every week my feed serves me the same post: a screenshot of a RevenueCat dashboard, a subscription app, a number with a lot of zeros, and a caption about how it took "only four months".
I'll be honest: I want that too.
So instead of quietly building and hoping, I'm going to try it in public — with one of my apps, real numbers, and a monthly update whether the numbers are good or embarrassing.
The app
Reset Ladder is a private iOS app that helps people gradually step away from an unwanted compulsive habit. I wrote about how and why I built it back in June: no shame, no accounts, nothing leaves your phone, and a slip moves you one step down the ladder instead of resetting you to zero.
The product works. People who find it, use it. Paying for it is a different story.
The starting point
Here are the last 30 days, straight from App Store Connect and RevenueCat:
- App Store impressions: 579
- Product page views: 44
- Downloads: 12
- Free trials started: 0
- Paying subscribers: 0
- MRR: $0
Not quite $500k. Not quite $1 either.
Two things stand out. The good one: it's growing. Earlier this year Reset Ladder got single-digit downloads in an entire quarter; now it's twelve a month. Tiny, but about four times the pace.
The bad one: twelve downloads turned into exactly zero trials. Everyone who installs the app sees the offer at the end of onboarding: a free week, and a clear "skip" button. Nobody started the trial. Twelve people is far too few to conclude much, but it's a useful nudge: if the offer doesn't land with the handful of people who already found the app, more traffic won't fix that on its own.
Why this app, out of the six I run
I have half a dozen live products, and spreading myself across all of them is exactly why none of them has moved much. So I picked one, and I picked it on purpose:
- People in this category pay. The leading app in this space reportedly went from launch to around a quarter of a million dollars in monthly revenue within a few months. The demand is real, and it's not a "nice to have" problem.
- The product is done. Subscriptions, a free trial, App Store approval — all in place. What's missing isn't features.
- The bottleneck is obvious. A few hundred impressions a month is nothing. Almost nobody knows the app exists.
So the main problem isn't the product. It's distribution. And distribution is the part I've been avoiding, because building is fun and marketing feels like shouting into a void.
The experiment
For the next few weeks, Reset Ladder gets at least two hours every single day. Not on features — on getting found, and on not wasting the people who already find it.
- A content engine. Short educational posts about how urges, triggers and slips actually work — calm, no "become a warrior" energy, which is the opposite of most content in this space. One post a day.
- A content farm, literally. I'm a developer, so instead of designing every slide by hand, I'm writing a small script that turns a list of texts and backgrounds into ready-to-post slides. If a week of posts takes an hour instead of an evening, I can keep this going for months instead of burning out in two weeks.
- Getting into the lists. Articles like "best apps for…" rank for years. Getting into a few of them beats a viral video that's forgotten by Friday.
- Making the offer worth taking. Right now the paywall says "Unlock the full plan" and lists four generic features. That's a description of what's in the box, not a reason to try it. Same for the App Store page: what people see in search decides whether they tap at all.
What I'm not doing
No paid ads. No new features. No new products. No sixth project to distract me from the first five. Mondays go to all the boring maintenance across everything else; the rest of the week is Reset Ladder.
Why write about it at all
Mostly accountability. It's very easy to stay "busy" for a month and have nothing to show for it — I know, because I just did exactly that. Writing the starting numbers down makes it much harder to quietly move the goalposts.
I'll post an update in a month with the same numbers. If the experiment works, you'll see it here. If it doesn't, you'll see that too — and probably learn more from it.
$500k a month is a joke, obviously. But the distance between $0 and $500 a month isn't. Let's see how much of it I can close.
Reset Ladder is on the App Store. Next update: early November.