“after this very quiet launch of course I still got feedback from friends and a couple of Twitter followers... I continued developing cool new features because that's what developers do... I added cool stuff like statistics and new exercise types and stuff like that”

Building more features is not a growth channel

Lift Bear launched quietly with ~100 downloads in week one, then 10/week, earning $100 total in six months. Sebastian's response was to add more features — the classic developer trap. The lesson: a better feature set does not create a growth engine unless you have a channel to tell new people the feature exists. Features and distribution are separate problems that require separate solutions.