How to Get App Downloads With No Marketing Budget

Ellie at Willa, Editorial lead, Willa · Published August 8, 2026 · Updated August 25, 2026

Most indie developers assume that getting app downloads means buying ads. Bria never spent a dollar on them, and her apps have been downloaded more than 18 million times. At Willa's live session "How to Get Millions of Downloads (Without a Marketing Budget)," the former Google software engineer, who quit in 2020 to build mobile apps on her own terms, walked members through exactly how she did it: her cozy bubble tea game Boba Story cost a couple hundred dollars to build and reached $10,000 a month in revenue within four months, and her gamified focus timer Focus Friend, built with YouTuber Hank Green, hit number one on the App Store and has brought in millions of dollars. This post distills her playbook, which matters more than ever now that, as Bria pointed out, you no longer have to be a software engineer to ship an app.

How do you validate an app idea before you build it?

Bria's first rule surprises people: she markets before she builds. "I won't build anything unless I know there's a market for it," she said. In the early Boba Story days, that meant pulling reference images into a Google Doc, pointing her phone at her computer, and posting content as if the product already existed. If nobody bit, she moved on. If people responded, she built. She credits a book called The Right It with teaching her the principle.

Her practical validation tools, all free:

• Pre-order pages. Apple and Google both let you publish what looks like a real App Store listing (icon, screenshots, description) before the app exists. A comment saying "I'm interested" is low-stakes; an actual pre-order is real, vested interest.
• Email signups. "For someone to decide, in today's day and age, to give you their email: that's a strong indication that they care about what you're building."
• AI prototypes. This step used to require design or engineering skills. Today, Bria said, you can describe an app to Claude or ChatGPT and get a fake, non-functional prototype to market-test in an afternoon.

How do you get app downloads without paying for ads?

Bria laid out the levers that took her to millions of downloads, none of which involve an ad budget:

1. Become a creator yourself. After a small marketing class, Bria built a TikTok account for Boba Story and grew it to around 100,000 followers. Her insight: content that performs well on an algorithm tends to also perform well on the App Store, and posting gives you live feedback on your product. At the time she posted 3 to 5 times a day; she said the common guidance now is more like 7, until you find the messaging that clicks, after which you can repeat what works.
2. Partner with a creator. If the creator life isn't for you (Bria eventually decided it wasn't for her), work with someone who already has an audience. More on this below.
3. Make the product do the marketing. Boba Story's first 200,000 downloads came from TikTok; the rest snowballed through word of mouth. Special items like heart boba and kitty boba could only be obtained with three-character codes that Bria never published anywhere. Players had to find each other online, trade codes, and share screenshots to progress. "It made it much easier and visually appealing to share," she said. Focus Friend works the same way: people love showing off the little character's room they've decorated, "so it kind of did the marketing for itself."

Her bluntest lesson from six years of this: "Marketing mattered, and it outweighed the product, at least for getting the number of downloads. Where product matters is monetization and retention: people staying."

How do you partner with an influencer to launch an app?

Focus Friend came out of a dinner. Hank Green, who has close to 30 million followers across platforms, was a friend of Bria's partner, heard about Boba Story, and reached out a week later. Bria built the product, Hank did the marketing, and they invested roughly $40,000, mostly in art. The app hit number one on the App Store, won an App Store award, and was named a best app of 2025 on Google Play. Hank intentionally stopped posting about it that September, and it still gets thousands of downloads a day.

Her advice for structuring a partnership like this:

• Creators want this more than you think. In Bria's experience, creators "really deeply do not understand how to monetize their audiences, and they really want to." Most default to merch. If you can bring a software idea tailored to someone's community, "honestly, just sliding into their DMs is a way to start that partnership conversation."
• Give them skin in the game. Bria and Hank have a revenue share: he owns the IP, fronted most of the initial investment, and splits revenue with her fairly evenly. Without real buy-in, she warned, creators are fickle and will move on, leaving you stuck.
• Get the legal side in writing, and pick someone you trust. Having proven the model, Bria said that next time she'd keep the IP and take a larger share, since she now does most of the work.
• You don't need a mega-creator. For one member building a college career app, Bria suggested searching for productivity, "study with me," and college-life creators across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch. "If anyone can figure out how to crack an algorithm on one platform, they can figure out how to crack their algorithm on all of them."

What metrics matter most for a new app?

Bria sees builders make the same mistake constantly: piling on features. "Just one core feature that matters will determine everything," she said. Only four things deserve your attention:

• Core feature usage. Focus Friend is a timer. If people weren't using the timer, adding features wouldn't fix anything; the timer would need fixing.
• Day 1 retention. Do people open your app the day after downloading it?
• Day 7 retention. Are they back a week later? Together, these tell you whether people actually like what you made.
• Funnels. If your game has ten levels and only 20% of players reach level 3, the answer isn't building level 11; something is broken at level 3. Bria said AI can now set up this kind of analytics tracking for you.

How should you monetize your app?

Bria was direct about her biggest regret: treating monetization as an afterthought. She's found this mistake especially common among women who are passionate about the thing they built and "just really want people to use it." Her counter: "Make sure you are charging people for it, because you deserve it."

What's worked for her:

• Offer a subscription plus a lifetime option. Some users simply hate subscriptions, so Focus Friend sells a $40 one-time purchase, effectively prepaying two or three years. It accounts for a full 50% of revenue.
• Use freemium when you need scale. Hard paywalls work at a certain scale, but if your app depends on volume, like a community product, keep a complete free experience and put power-user features behind the paywall.
• Be careful with ads. Boba Story used opt-in rewarded ads (watch 30 seconds, earn an item), which suit younger players with time but no money. But ads require collecting user data, a dealbreaker for Focus Friend's strict no-data stance, and genuinely hard under COPPA if your app is for kids.

Monetization is also what bought Bria the life she designed the business around. During a medical crisis (her daughter was born at 25 weeks and spent almost four months in the hospital), Boba Story kept paying her the entire time she couldn't work. Today she works about three days a week and has surpassed her old Google salary.

How do you get featured by Apple?

A few concrete tips from Bria's experience getting Focus Friend featured:

• Apply to everything. Apple runs programs like Entrepreneur Camp and a small business program, and the App Store has buttons to nominate your own app for promotion. Bria learned the review team is surprisingly small and genuinely tries the apps submitted.
• Use Apple's own technologies. "If you want to get featured by Apple, use Apple technologies": widgets and whatever they're announcing at WWDC. This used to be a serious engineering lift; Bria, an engineer herself, said the platform-specific features that got Focus Friend featured were ones AI figured out for her. "Claude knows how to do it."
• Polish and keep the app updated. She cared about polish from day one, and credits it for much of Focus Friend's success.

She'd also lean on AI for the unglamorous parts she once did by hand: App Store listings, screenshots, and descriptions. One caution: she still hires human artists (cheaply, via Upwork and Fiverr), partly by preference and partly because Apple and Google "tend to be a little iffy" about promoting apps with AI art.

Key takeaways

• Market before you build: fake prototypes, pre-order pages, and email signups tell you whether a market exists before you invest anything.
• You don't need an ad budget. Become a creator, partner with one on a revenue share, or design features people have to share to use.
• Only four metrics matter early: core feature usage, day 1 retention, day 7 retention, and funnels. Resist adding features.
• Build monetization in from the start; a lifetime purchase option alongside a subscription drives half of Focus Friend's revenue.
• To get featured by Apple, apply to its programs, use its newest technologies (AI can write that code now), and keep your app polished.

One member asked whether Bria optimizes for AI search now that assistants are replacing traditional discovery. She admitted she hasn't touched it yet, focusing on App Store optimization and social instead, though she suspects all the Reddit chatter about Focus Friend is quietly doing that work. If you want to pull the lever she hasn't, start with our AEO playbook for showing up in ChatGPT answers and our guide to making your content visible in AI search.

Join us for the next one

This session came from a live Willa event, where members got to ask Bria their own questions about creator partnerships, COPPA, monetization, and more. Willa hosts expert-led sessions like this almost every week for women building careers with AI. See what's coming up on our events page, or become a member and learn alongside a community of women shipping real things.

• app marketing
• indie apps
• creator partnerships
• app store optimization
• monetization
• tiktok marketing

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