The first few dosen users were from an iosdevforum. Then someone recommended a nice feature - at first I wanted to tell them it's impossible. But as I was writi

The first few dosen users were from an iosdevforum. Then someone recommended a nice feature - at first I wanted to tell them it's impossible. But as I was writing an explanation, I realised it's actually possible :) Drank a lot of red bull for a week and pushed the feature to production. Then I emailed a reporter who covered our competition in TC weeks before, and put a post on HN. It picked up steam on HN, and the TC article appeared a day later: https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-store-prediction-tool-tells-developers-which-keywords-work/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-sto... Notice the crappy logo and make sure to watch the video - recorded in my living room after a few sleepless nights. While working on the improvements, I invented another feature (guessing competitors keywords), which is now a standard across the ASO apps. A few months later, users began telling us AppStore search algorithm changed. After a few weeks of crunching I published a slideshare explaining the recent changes. Another reporter picked it up: https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-changed-its-app-store-algorithm-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/29/looks-like-apple-has-chang... They embeded our slides, which pushed them into top 3 slideshares of the week, or something like that. (after a few years the viewcount is 500k or so) Users began coming in en masse (up until 800 paid or so), and people began sharing slides and so on. I gave a few podcast interviews, which pushed the promotion even further. But it was mostly TC and HN that pushed it so far.