I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode
8 comments
·September 21, 2025joeconway
For anyone like me that’s never heard of Lagree before https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lagree-buddy-wrist-metronome/i...
PullJosh
I’ve been working on promoting my seating chart app for teachers, Shuffle Buddy, on social media. I had a 1M view pop on TikTok when I first launched and have now been clawing along to try for continued engagement.
It’s reassuring to know that social media posts are hard for everyone and that it isn’t supposed to be easy. I keep looking for ways to create content that is genuinely beneficial to teachers and also convinces them to try my app, but it’s hard.
wahnfrieden
As a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion.
You can look into https://sideshiftjobs.com or https://playkit.xyz for scaling organic posting btw (unaffiliated)
jondwillis
“Organic”
The post screenshots in those links are… uh.. hey I look forward to all of the free time everyone will have to do more productive things.
bgun
tl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!
pixl97
Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.
limflick
I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.
I’m surprised the owner of Lagree didn’t sue you for the name of the app, he’s notorious for that. I also recommend hiring smaller creators, they can be amazing if it’s the right person