Dax, my personal agent, watches Vocabbie’s PostHog for me. Last week I asked it for a one-line read on the business. It said: good builder, bad marketer.
I have not stopped thinking about it.
The numbers back it up
Vocabbie ships almost every week. New practice modes, speech grading fixes, a release gate that catches regressions before they reach the stores. The app is in good shape. The install curve is not. Growth is organic, which is a polite way of saying I have done nothing to cause it.
I know how to make a product. I know a lot less about making people find one.
What I have tried
Posting on LinkedIn when I remember. Mentioning the app at the end of a podcast episode. That is the whole list. Compared to the hours I put into the app, marketing gets scraps.
Part of it is preference. Building is fun, distribution feels like homework. Part of it is that I never had to do it. At Yousician and Wolt there was a growth team. You shipped, they told people. As a solo founder that team is me, and I have been skipping the meeting.
What I am going to do
Treat distribution like a feature. It gets a ticket, it gets a week, it gets measured. I am starting with the things that compound: store optimisation per language, since Vocabbie is strongest in Finnish and Spanish, and one honest post a week about what I am building. Not “excited to announce”. Just what happened.
If you are a solo founder who cracked this, I want to hear how. Genuinely. Reply, email, anything.
And if you want to learn a language, Vocabbie is on both stores. See, I am learning.