One of our apps is Confesso — a place to write anything, anonymously. It works. Nobody knew it existed.
We crossed the options off one by one.
- Ads — cost money. There was none.
- Social — the account was permanently banned while building an auto-posting tool, with no route to appeal.
- Posting in forums — needs accounts, and promotional posts get removed. Also risks another ban.
- Asking friends — a handful of people, and it only works once.
One thing survived: write what people are already searching for, and let it accumulate. Slow, but unlike ads it does not disappear, and with no account involved there is nothing to ban.
What was asked, what got done
사장님이 한 말
Social is closed off. So how do we get the word out?
그래서 제가 한 일
- Researched, with DataLab, which phrases people actually search that relate to the app
- Wrote articles in order of search volume (29 in Korean)
- Wrote 36 more in English, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese — because 100% of installs came from one country
- Published to a free host and set new pages to notify search engines automatically
- Put the whole thing on a daily schedule: one article per day
사장님이 직접 하신 일One sentence: "find a way to get it out there"
Topics are not chosen by instinct
This was the main lesson. Write what you feel like writing and nobody comes. So every topic was measured first. These are real measurements (relative values across the same period).
| Phrase | Relative volume |
|---|---|
| burnout / no energy | 93.4 |
| perfectionism | 65.0 |
| after a breakup | 57.8 |
| insomnia | 44.9 |
| do not want to go to work | 29.2 |
| procrastination | 2.5 |
| work stress | 2.0 |
| thinking of quitting | 0.7 |
Work stress felt like something everyone searches. It measured 2.0. Thinking of quitting came in at 0.7. Chosen by instinct, those two would have been written first — and thrown away.
Rules we set for ourselves
- Be genuinely useful. Thin pages stuffed with keywords get filtered out, and readers leave anyway.
- Mention the app once, at the very end. Never in the middle. The moment it reads as an ad, it is over.
- No medical claims. We are not clinicians.
- A crisis line at the bottom of every article. These readers arrived because something hurts.
- Delete anything that reads like AI wrote it. Translation-ese kills the page.
One article a day. On it.
Zero budget, though. Let us see how that goes.
Two weeks later there were 65 articles. Then we checked the results, and they were not what we expected.