Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2GG0lyb_RI Channel: Starter Story Build Upload date: 20260502
Right now, thousands of Vibe Coders are launching their mobile app, but [music] most of them are making the exact same mistake. They ship the app and just hope that people will find it. But, the truth is, if your app store listing isn’t set up right, then nobody will ever see it, no matter how good your app is. To prove this, I invited Sebastian, a 50,000 per month iOS app builder, [music] to break down the exact app store optimization fundamentals that took his app from invisible to top two in the app store. In this video, I had Sebastian walk through [music] the three foundations when it comes to doing ASO [snorts] right. Specifically, what everyone gets wrong about keywords, a simple AB test that you can run to up your conversion rate, and [music] the single most important thing you need to do if you want to rank high in the iOS app store. These are the highest impact things you can do today, even this afternoon, if [music] you want to get thousands of downloads without doing any marketing at all. If you've launched an app, you're building one, or you're even thinking about it, do not skip this video. This is our ASO masterclass. Let's dive in. Welcome to Starter Story Build. All right, Sebastian, welcome back to Starter Story. We had you on recently. You built this awesome app, and you have some cool things to share today about how you grew it. But, before we get into all that, can you just give me an update about how things are going and what you built? >> I'm Sebastian. I build four apps that together make over50,000 per month. My main app is Habit Kit. It’s a habit tracking app for iOS and Android. I also recently launched a new app called Focus Kit, which has been great so far. My apps crossed 100,000 in January alone. And today, I’m excited to share more about my app store optimization strategy and show you everything I know. Wow, Sebastian, when we had you on to the channel, I think it was maybe eight months ago, you were doing like 100,000 a month. You did a lot of amazing stuff, but a lot of this is just being in the right place at the right time. And I think the right place to be right now is the iOS App Store. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. How to rank in the App Store. We have a bunch of stuff to go over today, but can you let us know like by the end of this video and all the stuff you’re going to share, what are people going to get from our conversation? Yeah, by the end of this video, you will know exactly what I did to get my app Habit Kit ranking in the top three on the US App Store for the keyword Habit Tracker, which is actually one of the most competitive keywords out there. Okay, cool. I’m excited about this. Before we dive in, can you just give us a high-level of what is ASO and what does it mean for your business? Absolutely. ASO stands for App Store Optimization. Think of it as SEO, but for mobile apps. When someone opens the App Store and types, for example, Habit Tracker or Fitness App, Meditation App, ASO is actually what determines whether your app shows up at the top of the search results or deep down at position 34, where nobody will ever find it. About 98% of my users find Habit Kit directly through the App Store, Google Play. I literally do no marketing at all besides that. Not from Twitter, not from Instagram ads. Just people opening the store. Okay, cool. I mean, this is amazing. There are hundreds of millions of people that are browsing the App Store looking for apps and you’ve kind of capitalized on this, where you don’t have to spend money on paid ads, you don’t need to do Twitter marketing, you don’t need to go on TikTok. You just did a few things and 98% of your customers came from App Store search. You are the example of someone who has nailed it perfectly. So, I wanted to bring you on to talk about what are the three highest impact, lowest effort things that you can do now that anybody who’s building apps could do right now to rank better in ASO and get thousands of free customers. The most important thing you can do is optimizing your ASO is basically the strategic placement of keywords in your apps meet metadata. This is what Apple and Google use to understand your app and decide when to show it in search results. The app name and the subtitle are the most important ASO factor. Nothing else comes close to it. Okay, cool. So, what you’re saying is you may want to think about what the keywords that people are searching for when you come up with the name. The name of your app is Habit Kit or it has Habit in the name, which is kind of genius. How can someone watching this do the same? Yeah, so before you actually name your app, you have to go one step back and actually do some keyword research before that. You need to understand the keyword landscape you’re moving in. [music] What do people actually search for on the App Store? LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude can help you with that. It’s a great tool to brainstorm new keywords. And then you have to validate whether people actually search for those terms. I use the tool called because it’s very affordable and it lets you track unlimited keywords, which is perfect when you’re building a new app. ASO Tool shows you a popularity score of your keyword. That means how often do people search for this keyword. And the other is the difficulty. How hard is it to actually rank for the keyword based on competition. So, the sweet spot is a high popularity and a manageable difficulty. But honestly, my advice would be for your primary keyword, rather compete for a hard, high-value keyword than dominate an easy, low-volume one. After you got that done, you can finally name your app. The most important rule, put your primary keyword in your app name. This is why Habit Kit is actually called Habit Tracker {dash} Habit Kit. My brand name is Habit Kit, of course, but the keyword Habit Tracker is much more valuable to me. Companies like Duolingo can afford to put in seconds because they are such a popular app, but you as an indie developer can’t really afford it. The other thing, put your keywords into the subtitle of your app. Your subtitle gets another 30 characters on the App Store and you can use these for secondary keywords. For Habit Kids, my subtitle is streaks and accountability. Another important rule is to don’t repeat keywords in the name and the subtitle. Apple sees them as one combined string for indexing. And the last part is the keyword field. In App Store Connect, there’s a keyword field with 100 characters. Users in the App Store never see this, but Apple indexes it for search. There’s some rules that you have to follow for this field. You have to separate keywords with commas, don’t use spaces, don’t repeat words from your name or subtitle, don’t use plurals if you already use singular, don’t include competitor app names. Apple might reject this. Try to utilize all 100 characters. I love everything that Sebastian is sharing right now about how to actually rank in the App Store. But, this is just one of many ways to grow your app. As you guys know, right here in this channel, I’ve talked to dozens of successful mobile app founders and they’ve shared a bunch of different ways to grow your apps in 2026 and beyond. And from all these conversations, I’ve decided to put together the mobile app growth cheat sheet. It’s a free resource to help you figure out the strategies that real founders that are making real revenue are using right now to actually grow their apps. Inside this guide, you’ll find the seven different tactics broken down into bite-size lessons to help you [music] grow your app today. If you’re ready to stop building and start growing, then head to the link in the description to download the mobile app growth cheat sheet for free right now. All right, let’s get back to the episode. Okay, so, what I love about these is these are the things that get right. They don’t take a a of time. You just do it right the first time or at least if you’re building an app now, you can kind of make some of these quick changes, and clearly it’s working for you because you’re doing a ton of revenue on the App Store. So, that’s super cool. What is the second foundation, the second kind of lowest effort, highest impact thing you can do to rank high in the iOS App Store? [music] Okay, now we’re getting a little bit more visual. The second most important thing about your App Store listing are screenshots. Screenshots affect your conversion rate the most. The brutal truth is, you only have about 3 to 5 seconds to convince someone to download on your App Store listing, and users are scrolling through your screenshots like crazy. There are some strategies that I would follow. The first one is always put your best and most visually impressive feature on your first screenshot. For Habit Kit, I put grid-based habit view there. It’s unique, it’s beautiful, it’s colorful, and it immediately differentiates us from other habit trackers. Don’t put some generic welcome screen or onboarding screen there. That wouldn’t make sense. Another rule that I would follow is show real user interface. People want to see what they’re actually getting. Don’t put too many abstract graphics or lifestyle photos. They might look fancy in there, but ultimately, they don’t really help someone understand your app. Make sure to AB test different versions. Apple lets you do this with their product page optimization feature, and this lets you test different versions of your app page. For example, I recently had a designer create beautiful new screenshots for Habit Kit, way better looking than my original self-made ones. I was sure they would boost conversions because they looked so much better, but I did the AB test, and my old, less polished screenshots actually had a higher conversion rate. So, the lesson, don’t assume fancy is always better. Always test and sometimes authentic beats professional. Yeah, visually showing the user what they’re going to get, keeping it authentic. I can see how it’s super important, especially if someone is scrolling through the App Store and you want to catch their eye. And if you lose them, you may never get that install. Thanks for sharing that. What would be the number three foundation when it comes to ASO? Last but not least, we have reviews and ratings in the App Store for your app. Gathering those ratings and reviews is super important. They actually give app social proof. Ratings boost your search rankings. Apple and Google heavily factor ratings into their algorithms and they also up your conversion rate. Even if you rank well, poor reviews tank your downloads. Habit Kids has over 7,400 ratings on iOS with a 4.8 star average and over 10,000 ratings on Google Play with 4.6. And this took years to build, but this is a massive competitive advantage against newer apps. Yeah, I was just chatting with my buddy who launched his first app and he kept asking me what features do I build? Do I add a paywall? The first thing I said to him from a lot of the conversations we’ve had on this channel is you need to get a lot more reviews and you need to up your star rating. That should be like your number one thing to focus on right now because, as you mentioned, more reviews push your app up, get it more downloads, which sends more data back to Apple saying we like this app. So it’s this like virtuous cycle. This is maybe the biggest thing, I think. How can someone watching this implement this? Yeah, getting new reviews is really hard, but I can tell you what worked for me. So, timing is everything. Show the review prompt at a happy moment in the life cycle of your app. Not during onboarding, not when something breaks. For Habit Kids as an example, I show it right after someone completes their first habit. They feel accomplished at this moment and that’s when you usually have to ask for a review. Don’t be annoying. If someone dismisses the prompt, don’t show it again for a while. Respect your user and his needs. Definitely respond to every review. I do this since I started building apps. I reply to every review. I thank the good ones. I try to help on the bad ones. This builds massive trust and people sometimes update their one-star reviews to a five-star after you fix their issue. And I have a email signature trick. I get a lot of support emails for Habit Kit and after each reply, I always add, “Hey, if you’re enjoying the app, I’d be grateful for a review.” And in this moment, the user just got a quick and kind help from an engaged indie developer and a gentle ask for review at this moment often works. And that amounts to a lot of happy five-star reviews, actually. My last tip, use reviews as product insights. If 20 people mention wanting the same features in your reviews, that’s a strong signal. I’ve prioritized entire features based on review patterns. That’s amazing. I mean, that’s one of those little things that I see with a lot of founders who come on to the channel is the care they have for every single person that uses their app, almost the feeling of gratitude. Hey, you’re using this thing that I built and I hope it works for you and I’ll do whatever it takes to try to fix your issues. This is usually what I see in founders like you who are crushing it. Thank you for coming on and sharing these three foundations. This is the real stuff here. Last question that I ask every founder who comes on, if you could go back in time to just starting your app, hoping to one day be at this place that you’re at, what advice would you have for app builders who want to follow in your footsteps? >> So, one piece of advice I would wish someone had given me at the start of my journey is give it time. ASO is not a quick win. It’s a long game. When I launched Habit Kit in November 2022, I was invisible on the App Store. I’d search for Habit Tracker and scroll through pages without finding my app. I was doing all the right things. I did my keyword research. I made cool-looking screenshots. I was collecting reviews, but I [music] wasn’t ranking. But, I kept going. I kept shipping updates. I improved the app, and very slowly things started to shift. After about 6 months, I cracked the top 10 in some non-US markets like the UK and Germany. That was pretty encouraging and big for me. After about a year, I started appearing in the top 10 in the US occasionally, not consistently, but I was there. [music] And after nearly 3 years, I’m now consistently in the top five. Yeah, so ultimately, success in the App Store is a marathon, not a sprint. Okay, cool. So, one thing that I love about ASO is that the actions that you take today, you may not see the results for many, many months. So, stick with it, focus on the principles. Thanks for coming on and sharing all this, Sebastian. Congrats [music] on all your success. Thank you very much for having me.