Fun Libs: 113,000 installs later
Fun Libs was the first thing I made that strangers actually used.
Not friends being polite. Not someone I sent a link to. People I had never met found it in the Play Store, installed it, and kept using it.
It has now passed 113,000 installs. I did not market it. There was no launch plan, no paid acquisition, no content calendar, and no clever growth loop. I put it out, it found a small place in search, and it kept growing.
The app is deliberately simple. It is a Mad Libs-style game: fill in a few words, get a ridiculous story back. The idea is easy to explain, which is part of why I liked it. It did not need a deck or a long onboarding flow. You either understand it immediately or you do not.
At the time, I was mostly trying to make something complete. Earlier projects were exercises: a page, a prototype, a feature I could show someone. Fun Libs had to stand on its own. Someone could find it on a random Tuesday, with no context from me, and decide in a few seconds whether it was worth keeping.
When you build for yourself, you can fill gaps with your own knowledge. You know what the button does because you put it there. You know what the app is supposed to be because you remember the idea behind it. Real users do not have that advantage. If something is unclear, they leave. Usually without telling you why.
The first installs made that concrete. I started looking at the app less as a thing I had made and more as a thing other people had to live with. Tiny details mattered more than I expected: wording, the order of screens, whether an interaction felt immediate, and whether there was anything worth coming back for once the novelty wore off.
Most of that work was unglamorous. It was looking at something and admitting that it was slightly annoying.
The organic growth also changed how I think about distribution. "Build it and they will come" is bad advice in general. Plenty of good things disappear because nobody sees them. But if a product has a clear purpose and sits where people are already looking for it, it can travel further than you expect.
The Play Store is a real marketplace. People arrive with intent. They search for a category, compare a few options, and make a quick decision. Fun Libs benefited from being understandable in that environment. It is not trying to teach a new behaviour or explain a complicated business model. It offers a familiar kind of entertainment quickly.
That did not make growth automatic. It gave me a reason to care about the unsexy basics: a clear name, honest screenshots, a description that says what the app is, and an experience that does not waste people’s time.
Fun Libs makes money through ads and in-app purchases. It is not life-changing money. It is meaningful because it came from something I made, published, and maintained.
There is a lot of noise around software businesses. Everything gets framed as a rocket ship, an exit, or a failure. I find that tiring. A project does not need to be enormous to be worth owning. A modest product with real users, some revenue, and low ongoing complexity is a good thing. It can teach you how customers behave. It can pay for itself. It can make the next project easier to start.
Fun Libs did not grow because I had an audience. It grew because people found it useful or enjoyable enough to install. The end user does not care about your stack, your build-in-public thread, or your founder story. They care whether the thing works and whether it gives them what they came for.
There are plenty of things I would do differently if I started it today. I would make some decisions faster. I would be more deliberate about what I measure and why. I would probably spend less time polishing details that only I could see. But I do not think the main lesson is "be more sophisticated."
The main lesson is to finish things. Fun Libs was not the perfect idea. It was not a carefully validated opportunity. It was a small app I could build, release, and improve. Releasing it gave reality a chance to weigh in. That is where the interesting part started.
Before users, every product idea exists in a protected environment. You can tell yourself it has potential forever. You can keep improving the plan. You can avoid the uncomfortable possibility that nobody wants it. Once it is public, you get a clearer answer. Sometimes the answer is silence. Sometimes it is a trickle of people you cannot explain. Occasionally, the trickle keeps going.
113,000 installs is a number I am proud of, but it is not the only reason Fun Libs matters to me. It was the first project that made the internet feel less abstract. There are people somewhere opening something I built, filling in a few words, and laughing at the result. I do not know most of them. I never will. That is the point.