My co-founder and I had just wrapped up our previous startup, despite our best efforts failed to take off. While trying to think of our next big idea we decided to make a simple app. Turns out this app is doing much better than our previous ideas.

The app is called "Sloth" - http://getsloth.com. It’s a Task Manager meets Countdown Timer. You input the tasks you need to get done, allocate time each task then start the timer.

We built a simple landing page and released the app to the AppStore. At first not much happened. Then we found a few subreddits related to studying and productivity. Things got interesting: we got a few hundred downloads in the space of few hours.

The next thing we knew, someone from reddit told us that Apple had featured Sloth as a Best New App. We were stunned but completely ecstatic!

We didn’t do anything special to get featured by Apple. Apple didn’t even write to us to tell us. We suspect Apple monitor apps which have significant amount of downloads in a short time. We then got told that an AppStore representative will manually review an app to decide whether it gets featured or not.

We ended up getting 45,000 downloads in the space of 4 weeks. Most of this happened in the first 2 weeks, and then it started to taper off.

We released an in-app purchase of $2.99 for some premium features. This has only been out about 3 weeks but around 1% of users are upgrading. We’ve gotten over 100+ positive emails from users. We reply to each email individually and have implemented popular suggestions.

HELP

Our biggest challenge is in marketing. We seem to have created something that users want, and are willing to pay (something) for it. Our goal is to expand this beyond an app and build out a suite of productivity apps.

We’re a small 2-person team and have next to $0 marketing budget. Would LOVE to get your thoughts on potential marketing ideas and ways to grow.

Thanks!