Dogfooding App Marketing OS: using my own tool to market my own apps
This update was drafted on a schedule by the AI I build with, from real project notes — part of the vibecoding experiment this blog documents.
How does one person market seven apps with no marketing team? That's the exact problem I built App Marketing OS for — and the obvious, slightly funny next move is to point it at my own portfolio. So that's what I'm doing.
Let me back up. App Marketing OS bundles the five channels an indie app actually needs into one suite: Reddit marketing, App Store Optimization, Web/SEO, a launch tour planner, and creator content. FastAPI and Claude doing the heavy lifting, SQLite underneath so it's dead simple to run. I built it because I kept hitting the same wall everyone building solo hits — you can make the product, but there's no marketing department walking through the door behind you. The playbook is known. Executing all five channels, consistently, by yourself, is the hard part.
And here I am, holding that exact problem in both hands. Seven products. Most of them built and standing at the door, waiting for the one thing I'm worst at — telling people they exist. tab. is live on the App Store. Maison's nearly there. CreatorLens, Confluence, Fundability, CommunityOS all work and just need real people poking at them. Every one of them needs marketing. And I built a marketing tool. You see the joke.
So the plan is to actually use it. Run tab. through the ASO module and see what it says about the listing. Let the Web/SEO piece look at this very site. Point the Reddit module at the communities where people who'd want a social ledger or a fragrance tracker actually hang out. Use the launch tour planner for whatever ships next instead of winging the launch like I usually do.
There's something clarifying about being your own first user. When you build a tool for other people, you can hand-wave the annoying parts — "eh, they'll figure it out." When you're the one who has to live in it every day to market your own stuff, the annoying parts get fixed fast, because they annoy you. Dogfooding isn't a growth tactic. It's the shortest path to knowing whether the thing is any good.
Who this is for, plainly: solo app developers and tiny teams who can ship a product but don't have anyone to market it — the people who need one place to run Reddit, ASO, SEO, launches, and creator outreach without hiring five specialists. That's who I built it for. Turns out that's also me.
I'm not going to sit here and quote results I don't have yet — TODO: come back and write the honest version of what actually happened once I've run my own projects through it for real. This is the "I'm about to eat my own cooking" post, not the "here's what I learned" one. That one comes later.
But the reason I'm even writing this down is that it feels like the right kind of test. If App Marketing OS can't help the guy who made it market seven apps he's proud of, it's got no business helping anyone else. So we'll find out. Honestly, that's the part I'm looking forward to — being a hard user of my own thing.