Original Summary

I’ve been working on Slean for quite a while now. It started as a photo cleaner I built for myself, and over time it grew into a proper iOS app, then Android too. The product itself is in a place I’m pretty happy with. It finds duplicate and similar photos, handles compression and cleanup on-device, has no ads, and I’ve added a few editing tools along the way as well. The harder part has been getting people to actually discover it. Photo cleaners are an insanely crowded category, so even having something genuinely different like no ads, no account requirement and privacy-first/on-device processing doesn’t automatically translate into downloads. What makes it a little frustrating is that conversion doesn’t seem to be the main problem. When people actually download Slean, a good percentage of them end up paying. I just can’t consistently get enough impressions and installs in the first place. I’ve tried App Store ads, Google/Meta ads, Reddit, ASO, and recently rebuilt the website to start working on SEO and GEO as well: https://slean.app also store links: app store google play store Some of these brought installs, but nothing has really turned into a consistent acquisition channel yet. My ad budget is also pretty limited, so I obviously can’t spend anywhere near what the bigger players in this category do. At one point I actually stopped marketing Slean for a few months. What kept me interested was that people still continued finding the app organically, and some of them were paying users. That made me feel like there might still be something here if I can solve the distribution problem. For people here who have marketed a mobile app in a crowded category: what actually started working for you? Was it ASO, SEO, short-form content, paid ads, creators, Reddit, or something else? And more importantly, what did you spend way too much time or money on before realizing it wasn’t worth it?   submitted by   /u/ajfrusciante [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/22 18:58:30