My app made €0 for 6 months. Today I make a comfortable living from it, here's how.

Honestly, the foundation of all of it is traffic and conversion rate: the more traffic you get, the more conversions you get. So the real question was, how do I get traffic?

I tried pretty much everything: social media, cold emailing, ads. Some of it worked a little, some of it was expensive, and I ended up with a few users, but none that paid.

Since I didn't have much of a budget, I focused on organic content. The problem is that Twitter is really tough, and both Instagram and TikTok basically require making videos, which I'm not comfortable with. Then I noticed that photo carousels on TikTok were performing at least as well as videos. And it's not just a personal impression: a study of nearly 700,000 TikTok posts from early 2025 found that photo carousels get around 80% more engagement than video, for roughly the same reach.

So I set up several accounts and started posting carousels every day, several times a day.

What I learned, concretely:

1. Carousels perform at least as well as video right now, and often much better on engagement, for a fraction of the work. No filming, no editing, no being on camera.

2. Slide 1 is everything: it has to be a strong hook, and never talk about the product directly.

3. One idea, many angles. I take a single pain point my app solves and post it as four or five different carousels with different hooks. Most flop, then one randomly hits 40,000 views.

4. Value first, every time. The second it smells like an ad, the reach dies.

5. Volume wins. I post every day, three to five times a day, across several accounts built around my target customer.

6. The best move is to grow accounts without promoting anything at first, in a niche chosen to attract your target customers and to teach the algorithm who your content is for. Once you have a hundred or so followers and a steady rhythm, you start slipping in promo posts.

The progression, month by month (the screenshot is my app's dashboard, not the tool's). The first month I really committed to it, around €30, the first sign of life after six months at zero, and I'd launched five TikTok accounts. The second month, €500. The third, €3,095. And over the last 30 days, €7,051, with no ads and no audience to start with.

What made it sustainable solo I use Swiply Farm. Doing it by hand across several accounts took me a ton of time, so I built a tool for it: it generates the carousels (real photos and text) and lets me publish straight to TikTok. That let me ramp up the pace, with several posts a day on each account.