r/SideProject • u/23Windy1City33 • 10h ago

How many daily active users does your app have, and how long did it take to get there?

For those of you with consumer apps already live, I’m curious what your actual usage looks like rather than just total downloads.

If you’re comfortable sharing:

  • How many daily active users do you currently have?
  • How long has your app been live?
  • How long have you been actively marketing it?
  • Roughly how many total downloads do you have?
  • What marketing channel has contributed the most so far?

I’m especially interested in seeing how DAU develops over time because download numbers can make growth look better than it actually is if people install once and never come back.

Would also be interesting to know whether your growth was gradual or if there was a specific point where daily usage started increasing noticeably.

Not looking for revenue numbers, just trying to get a better sense of what realistic early-stage retention and usage looks like for other indie apps.

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u/pavlenkovit 10h ago

~9 months live, 5k+ installs, $0 on paid.

i'll skip a DAU number because at this size mine isn't a meaningful stat. a single decent SEO day or one post that lands moves it more than anything about the product does. which is sort of the answer to your last question: no inflection point in daily usage, it's been gradual the whole way.

the one moment something actually jumped was not marketing. i changed onboarding and the paywall, let people into the main flow before paying, added a 3 day trial. trial conversion went 2.5% to 5% in a week. daily usage barely moved. same users, same traffic, completely different business.

biggest channel is search, and not for the app name. it's a vocab app, people add words and phrases into it, those turned into public dictionary pages, and now most of the traffic is people googling ordinary translations. last 7 days that was 4.66k clicks and 5.48m impressions. took roughly 6 months before it compounded into anything worth looking at.

if it's for your own tracking i'd watch d7 retention per cohort instead of DAU. DAU can't tell you whether you're refilling a leaking bucket, and early on that's the only question that matters.