How to promote a mobile application when you have little or no ad budget comes down to order. The founders who get this right do a small number of things in sequence. They pick one channel, build formats they can repeat, collect a waitlist before the app is out, and launch to people who already know the name. The founders who get it wrong do everything in the first week and then go quiet.
This guide is that sequence, from before launch to the first months after it, with the reasoning for each step. The first-hand example is a dating app I built and own. I paid for the organic build and for the paid content that failed, so I can describe both.
If you want the four organic plays an app has and how they stack, that is a separate piece. This one is the promotion calendar: what to do first, second and third, and why.
Read the four organic plays for an app →
Why no ad budget is a workable place to start
Paid reach gets more expensive most years, and the platforms say so themselves. In its annual report to the SEC, Meta said its average price per ad rose 9% in 2025, after a 10% rise the year before. Put those two years together and the same Meta budget now buys about 17% less reach than it did two years ago.
That matters most for a new app. A cold ad for an app nobody has heard of has to introduce the product and earn trust in a few seconds. An ad shown to someone who already follows your account only has one job left.
So this order is not a consolation prize for founders without money. It is the order I would use with money too. Organic work shows you which message and which format people respond to, and finding out costs time and no media spend.
The honest cost is speed. Organic is slower at the start, so plan for months and expect a slow first stretch.
Before you promote anything, check what promotion cannot fix
Promotion brings people to the door. It does not change what they find inside. If people who try the app do not come back, more attention only speeds up the bad news.
Run three checks before step one. Can you say who the app is for in one sentence? Can you show the app doing its main job in a few seconds of screen recording? And is there a moment early on where a new user gets what they came for? If any answer is no, fix that first. It is cheaper than any channel.
Step 1: pick one channel where your users already are
The first decision in how to promote a mobile app is where, and the answer is one place. For most consumer apps that place is short-form video: TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. The reason is how those feeds hand out reach. They show a video to strangers based on how people respond to it. TikTok says follower count is not a direct factor in its recommendations. So a new account can reach people from its first video, which most other channels do not allow.
Choose the platform where your future users already spend their evenings, even if your team prefers posting somewhere else. If you cannot tell, look at where the apps closest to yours get real comments, and start there.
One channel does not have to mean one feed. A short vertical video can go on all three with almost no extra work, because it is one production routine. What you must not do is start a podcast, a newsletter, a Discord server and a blog in the same month. Every founder plans to be on five platforms. Most end up tired on five platforms.
Claim the same handle everywhere on day one, even where you will not post yet. Put one link in every bio. Before launch that link goes to the waitlist. After launch it goes to the store.
Step 2: build two or three formats you can repeat
A format is a video you can make again next week with a new subject. Same structure, same opening move, same length, different content. Formats matter more than single ideas because one good video teaches you very little you can reuse. A format that works can run for months.
For an app, the formats that tend to earn installs share one trait. They show the product doing its job early in the video. A founder talking to camera about why the app matters is asking a stranger for patience. A screen showing the result the user wants gives them a reason to stay.
Four formats are good starting points for an app with no budget:
- The result first. Open on the outcome the app produces, then show the few taps that got there.
- The problem where it happens. Film the annoying moment the app removes, in the place it really occurs, then show the fix.
- The build in public. Show what you shipped this week and ask one specific question about it. This one works before the app exists.
- The reply. Answer a real comment or a real objection with a short video. The comments write your next scripts for you.
Pick two or three and run them long enough to compare. Change one thing at a time: the opening line, the first frame, the length. When one format clearly beats the others, make more of it and drop the weakest. That is the whole method, and it needs a phone and a free editing app.
Volume beats polish at this stage. The platform needs a body of work before it knows who to show you to. A team that spends three weeks on one beautiful video has run one test. Most mobile app promotion strategies that hold up look like this: fewer ideas, repeated more often, judged on evidence.
Step 3: open the waitlist before the app is out
Most apps start promoting on launch day. That is late. A waitlist lets you start months earlier, and it changes what your videos are for. Every video now has a job: get the viewer to put their name down.
Keep the waitlist page plain. One sentence on who the app is for and what it does. One field for an email address or a phone number. One line about what people get for joining early, and it has to be true. Then link that page from every bio and mention it in the videos that are doing well.
A waitlist also gives you a number that means something. A view costs the viewer nothing. A follow costs a tap. An email address is a small act of trust, and it is yours to use on launch day no matter what any feed decides to show.
Here is the first-hand version. On a dating app I built and own, the waitlist reached 10,000 people in five months of active collection, after three months of preparation. The Instagram account grew to 18,000 followers and the TikTok account to 12,000. Paid media behind all of it was $0.
Read that receipt for what it is. It is a waitlist, so it says nothing about installs or retention. It is one app in one category, and it promises your app nothing. It shows that an app can gather a real audience before launch without buying it, and that polished paid content can fail completely on the same product.
Step 4: treat launch week as a release to people who know you
Launch day is a bad day to meet your audience for the first time. If steps one to three are done, you are not meeting them. You are telling people who asked to be told.
The order inside launch week matters:
- Email or text the waitlist first, before any public post. They signed up to be early, so let them be early. Give them one clear action: install the app and try its main job.
- Post the launch in your best-performing format. Launch week is the wrong week to try a new one.
- Swap every bio link from the waitlist to the store listing on the same day.
- Ask early users for an honest store review once they have used the app, and reply to every review you get.
- Turn what happens into content: first reactions, first bugs fixed, first requests. Keep posting through the whole week.
Both stores let people commit before release: Apple offers pre-orders and Google Play offers pre-registration. Use them next to your own list, never in place of it. A store pre-order belongs to the store. An email address belongs to you.
Not everyone on a waitlist installs. Some signed up months ago and have moved on. So the list should hear from you more than once across the week, with a different reason each time.
Step 5: keep the accounts working in the first months
The launch spike fades for every app. What you do in the months after decides whether the accounts keep bringing users or go quiet. Keep the formats running while you work on the product. The accounts are now the cheapest way to tell people about every improvement.
Let users supply the material. Real results, real screens and real complaints from people using the app convince more than anything a founder says. Ask permission, then build formats around them. This is also how to market an app organically without the work growing every month. The more users you have, the more material arrives on its own.
Add paid only behind proof. If you have a budget later, spend it first on the videos that already worked without it. Strangers watched them for free, so you know they hold attention. It is also the only form of paid work Underboss does.
What to measure when you promote an app for free
When you promote an app for free, time is the budget, so measuring the right thing matters even more. Views are the number the platforms show you first. On their own they are the least useful one.
| Easy to count | Worth counting |
|---|---|
| Total views across all videos | Waitlist signups, then installs, per week |
| Follower count on its own | Searches for the app's name in the store and on Google |
| Likes | Saves, shares and comments asking how to get the app |
| One video that took off | How a format performs across a run of videos |
Before launch, the number that counts is waitlist signups per week, set next to the format they came from. A simple way to see the source is to ask one question on the signup page: where did you hear about us?
After launch, watch installs per week and the share of people who come back. Then watch searches for your name. When someone sees a video, leaves the feed and types your app's name into the store or into Google, the video did real work. Google Search Console shows those searches for your website at no cost. App Store Connect and the Play Console show how many people reached your listing through search.
Where ASO, paid UA and PR sit in this order
Three things are missing from the steps above on purpose. Each has a place, and Underboss sells none of them, so read this section as a map.
ASO, the work on your store listing, comes after demand. Your icon, screenshots and first lines convert people who have already arrived. Get them clean and honest before launch, because every visitor passes through them. Deep keyword work can wait until people are searching for you. Apple's product page tests let you compare icons and screenshots once there is traffic to test on. For anything beyond that, hire an ASO specialist.
Paid user acquisition comes after proof. It works best once you know the app keeps its users and you have creative that has already earned attention for free. Run before that, it teaches you expensive things about a cold audience. If you want someone to manage paid UA as its own service, that is a different kind of agency from us.
PR is a spike. A story in the right outlet can fill a launch week, and then it is over. It works best when the article has somewhere to send people that you own: active accounts and a product that is ready. PR on top of an empty profile is a good day followed by a normal month.
See how we approach user acquisition →
Key takeaways
- Promoting an app without ads is a question of order: one channel, repeatable formats, a waitlist, launch week, then the first months.
- Pick the channel where your users already are. For most consumer apps that is short-form video.
- Open the waitlist before the app is out. An email address is worth more than a view, and it stays yours.
- On a dating app I built and own, the organic build produced a 10,000 person waitlist at $0 paid. Roughly 4,000 euros of produced and paid UGC converted zero users.
- ASO, paid user acquisition and PR come after demand and proof exist. Underboss does not sell them.
If you want this order applied to your app, ask for the free teardown. Send a link to the app, or to the waitlist if it is not out yet, along with its channels. Within three days you get a written read on what brings people in today and what we would build first. No call, and the plan is yours whether or not we work together.