ASO for indie developers

Who it's for

• Indie developers who design, build and ship their app on their own, or close to it.
• Small teams with an app that's live or about to launch, where nobody has time to focus on ASO.
• Indies whose app already has users and who want to grow it organically without depending on ads.

The problem I solve: when you build the app yourself, marketing always comes last. You launch, the listing stays exactly as it was on day one and the downloads don't come. You don't need to do everything at once; you need to do the highest-impact things first.

What's included

I work in the order that moves the needle most, and I'll explain why:

1. Icon. It's the first thing any user sees, whether they come from organic or paid. I review yours against your competitors and suggest how to test it.

2. Keywords. Without keywords nobody finds you organically. I research the searches that fit your app and hand you a ready-to-use title, subtitle, keyword field and descriptions.

3. Screenshots. Once someone has tapped through, screenshots are what convince them. I help you make them show what your app actually does.

4. Reviewed localisation. If you want to launch in more languages, I prepare the metadata and review every language before it goes live.

5. Tracking. Impressions, downloads from search and from browse, listing conversion rate and your keyword rankings, measured month by month: a week is too short for organic to move.

All with a clear plan of what comes first and why. I won't hand you a huge plan you can't keep up with, just a few levers, in order, and a clear read on what each one does.

The experience behind it

I'm an indie too. I design, build and ship my own iOS apps, so I know the limits on time, design and budget first-hand.

• Ferro, my strength training app. I launched it with ASO metadata in 30 languages. When I reviewed the screenshot text, I found machine translation failing systematically: "lift" translated as an elevator, "PR" (personal record) as public relations, and "track" carrying surveillance connotations in some languages. The lesson: never publish a localisation without checking it language by language, especially in your priority markets, which for me were Arabic and Thai.
• HouseSaver, my app for planning savings towards buying a home. I use it to try out on my own app what I recommend to clients: onboarding, paywall and listing localisation.

I've also worked with indie developers and small teams, and before that I ran my own game studios: with Atalana Games we passed a million organic downloads with idle games, right in the genre's boom and against fierce competition.

How we work, in 4 steps

1. Free mini audit. If your app is already live, I review your listing and tell you what I'd change first. No commitment.
2. Proposal. A fixed-price foundation covering icon, keywords and screenshots, plus optional monthly management if you'd like me to stay on.
3. Paid upfront, no lock-in. You pay before each phase starts and can stop whenever you want.
4. Work and measurement. I apply the changes in order and measure their effect on your impressions, downloads and conversion.