You built an app and nobody uses it. Here is the order to fix it

Four causes, opposite cures, and one number that tells you which one you have before you waste a month on the wrong fix

The usual advice is to market more, which is unhelpful in the same way that "score more goals" is unhelpful. Before you spend a month on the wrong fix, work out which of four situations you are actually in. It takes an afternoon.

First, get the one number that decides everything

Open your analytics and find unique visitors in the last 30 days. If you have no analytics, that is the first task and it takes fifteen minutes.

Under about 100 visitors: you have a distribution problem and nothing else. Your conversion rate is not measurable at this volume, your copy is not the issue, and your onboarding is not the issue. Anything you conclude from ten visitors is noise. Skip to case one.

Several hundred visitors and almost no signups: people are arriving and leaving. That is case two or three, and it is worth finding out which before you buy more traffic.

Signups that never come back: a retention problem, which is a different article and usually a product one.

Case one: nobody has seen it

The most common by a distance, and the least accepted, because it means the problem is outside the editor. Building a good app and shipping it is not distribution. There is no mechanism by which strangers discover a new URL on their own.

What actually works when you have an hour a day and no audience:

• Go where the problem is already being discussed.Not where your category is discussed. People do not search for "project management tool", they write "I keep losing track of what my contractors are doing". Search the complaint, not the category. There is a repeatable method for finding those threads that takes about twenty minutes.
• Answer the question without pitching.A comment that solves the person's problem and mentions your tool at the end, honestly labelled as yours, outperforms every clever tactic. It also does not get you banned, which matters more than people think because the ban is usually permanent and the domain is usually included.
• Talk to twenty people directly. Not a broadcast. Twenty individual messages to people who have publicly described the problem you solve. Most will ignore you. The three who reply are worth more than a launch.
• Publish the thing only you can write. One page about the specific problem, with the actual numbers from your own experience. This compounds slowly and is the only channel that keeps working while you sleep.

Notice what is not on that list: a bigger launch, a redesign, Product Hunt, paid ads, or a new feature. All of those are things to do after you know that people who see the product want it.

Case two: they saw it and did not understand it

Symptom: traffic arrives, bounces in under fifteen seconds, and you have had at least one conversation where someone smart asked what your product does after reading the homepage.

The test is brutal and free. Show your homepage to five people for five seconds, then ask what it does and who it is for. If they cannot say, no amount of traffic will help, because you are paying to send people to a page that loses them.

The fix is almost always the same: say the concrete thing rather than the impressive thing. Replace the abstraction in your headline with the sentence you would use to describe the product to a friend in a pub. Name the user. Name the problem in their words. Show the output of the product above the fold rather than a screenshot of an empty dashboard.

Case three: they understood it and did not care

Symptom: people understand the product, say "nice", and never return. This is the hardest case and the one most often misdiagnosed as a marketing problem.

It usually means the problem you solve is real but not urgent, or it is urgent for a group that is not the group you are talking to. The cure is not more traffic; it is finding the narrower group for whom this is a Tuesday morning emergency rather than a mild inconvenience, and rewriting everything for them.

The fastest way to find that group is to look at whoever has already engaged, however few. Not the average user. The one person who was weirdly enthusiastic. What is true about them that is not true of everyone else?

Case four: right product, wrong room

Symptom: you are doing the work, posting consistently, and getting nothing, while a worse product in your space is visibly growing.

Usually a channel mismatch. Developer tools do not sell on TikTok. Consumer apps for parents do not sell on Hacker News. A B2B product with a three thousand euro price does not sell through a launch platform. Each channel has an audience and a native format, and being excellent in the wrong one produces nothing at all rather than a little.

Before committing another month, score the channels against your actual product rather than against what you enjoy doing. Most early products have exactly two or three viable channels and seven that are a waste of a quarter, and choosing between them has a method.

The order, in one paragraph

Get analytics. If under 100 visitors a month, ignore everything except getting in front of people who already have the problem, and do it by hand for a month. Above that, run the five second test before you buy any traffic. If the message is clear and people still do not care, narrow the audience rather than widening the funnel. If they care and nothing is happening, you are probably in the wrong room and should change channel rather than effort level. Only then consider tooling.

One honest note about the version of this problem you are most likely to have: if you have been building for months and marketing for a week, the answer is case one, and no diagnosis is required.