Promoting My Sleep App on a $0 Budget: SEO, GEO, and a Lot of Patience

I'm an indie developer. I built DRMN — a small iOS app for sleep and focus sounds — mostly on evenings and weekends. There is no marketing team, no ad budget, and no venture funding. If DRMN is going to find users, it has to happen through work I can do myself: writing, publishing, linking, waiting, and trying again.

This post is not a success story. It's a field report. So far the results are modest — close to zero, if I'm honest about downloads that clearly came from this SEO and GEO experiment. But the experiment continues, and I think other solo builders might recognize the pattern.

What I'm actually promoting

DRMN helps you fall asleep faster or stay focused during work by listening to sleep sounds, focus sounds, and ambient noise. It's on the App Store. That's the whole product pitch.

The hard part isn't building the app. The hard part is being visible in a world where everyone else also has an app, a landing page, and a blog post titled "10 tips for better sleep."

My zero-budget strategy: SEO + GEO + syndication

I split the work into three layers.

SEO — search engine optimization on my own site. I run a blog on drmn.xyz with articles about white noise, pink noise, rain sounds, focus in open offices, and similar topics. The goal is straightforward: rank for questions people already type into Google, and give them a useful answer before mentioning the app.

GEO — generative engine optimization. Same content idea, different destination. Instead of only chasing blue links on a results page, I'm trying to show up when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overviews something like "what app is good for sleep sounds on iPhone?" That means clear definitions, consistent naming, structured articles, and enough depth that an AI system can quote a paragraph without embarrassment.

Syndication — publishing related articles on third-party platforms that search engines and crawlers already trust: Telegraph, Blogger, and anywhere else I can place a link without spamming. The main site stays the canonical home; the satellite pages are extra surface area and extra paths back.

What I've been doing in practice

On drmn.xyz, I've published a growing set of blog posts — practical guides, not press releases. On Telegraph, I've been running a parallel experiment: shorter articles on sleep audio, masking, binaural beats, jet lag, and related niches, with a hub page listing the series.

Then there is the less glamorous work: putting links wherever it is legitimate to do so. App Store description. Website footer. Blog posts. Telegraph pages. Posts like this one on Blogger. Profiles that allow a URL. Answers in communities when someone genuinely asks for a sleep sound recommendation — not drive-by spam, but the kind of link you'd leave if you built the thing and stand behind it.

I've also automated parts of the pipeline — scripts that generate drafts, fetch images, publish to Telegraph, update the hub — because manually formatting every article would burn the little time I have.

The results (honestly)

Traffic from the blog exists, but it's small. Downloads attributable to this long-tail content experiment are, as far as I can tell, essentially zero so far — or so close to zero that analytics can't separate them from organic App Store browsing.

That's not the story I wanted to write. I wanted to report a clever GEO hack that moved the needle in a week. Instead I'm reporting patience.

What I have seen: pages getting indexed, a few long-tail queries showing impressions in Search Console, Telegraph articles living on telegra.ph with links back, and a content library that compounds instead of disappearing after a paid campaign ends. None of that pays the rent yet. All of it might matter on a longer timeline — or it might not. I don't know.

Why I'm continuing anyway

Three reasons.

First, paid acquisition isn't an option for me right now. If I stop writing, the only discovery path left is hope inside the App Store black box.

Second, SEO and GEO reward consistency over time. Indie projects often quit right before compounding kicks in. I'd rather find out by staying in the experiment than by stopping early.

Third, the content is useful even when it doesn't convert. If an article helps someone pick a sound for sleep, it did its job. The app link at the bottom is an invitation, not a trap.

What I'm trying next

  • More syndicated posts on Blogger and similar platforms — including meta posts like this one that explain the project in plain language.
  • Varied article formats so everything doesn't read like the same template.
  • Tighter internal linking on drmn.xyz without turning every paragraph into a sales pitch.
  • Watching AI search citations and Search Console queries to see which topics deserve depth.

If you're also shipping an app alone, you probably know the feeling: publishing into silence and checking analytics anyway. I'm still in that phase with DRMN.

Try the app — if you came here for sleep or focus sounds

If this post brought you here out of curiosity about distribution, thanks for reading. If you actually need something to listen to tonight:

I'll post another update if anything meaningful changes. Until then — zero budget, modest results, experiment ongoing.

— Vladimir Ivakhnenko

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