I’m Launching 52 Apps in 52 Weeks. Here’s What We Learned From Week 1: App Screenshot Kit

Speed exposes truth.

That’s the rule Nick (my cofounder) and I set for this entire challenge: 52 apps, 52 weeks, one developer, one growth marketer, lean development and lean marketing, and aim for revenue from day one.

No polishing. No “brand building.”
Build fast, validate fast, monetize fast.

Week 1 immediately reminded me why this project exists: every founder thinks they understand their market until actual buyers arrive or don’t. This first build forced us to confront assumptions, sharpen our lean framework, and learn how to recognize real signals from noise.

And the first product came directly from pain: Nick’s pain as a senior iOS engineer.

The Problem: App Store Screenshots Are Far More Painful Than Anyone Admits

Before we wrote a line of code, Nick walked me through the actual workflow indie developers deal with when creating App Store screenshots.

I didn’t realize how bad it was.

Apple has strict, unforgiving requirements: pixel dimensions, device frames, spacing rules, safety areas, consistency across multiple sizes, and a submission process that rejects anything even slightly off-spec. Even worse: the screenshots are a real conversion lever. Good screenshots increase download rate. Bad ones choke distribution.

For years, Nick did this manually:

• slicing exports

• placing mockups

• rebuilding layouts

• rewriting headlines

• exporting for every device size

• re-doing everything when a new update shipped

He eventually created his own internal flow: a consistent 3D device mockup pipeline, headline templates, and a layout system that made solo-built apps look like they had a full design team behind them.

That workflow became the basis for App Screenshot Kit, the first product in our 52-week marathon.

Project 1: App Screenshot Kit — Turning Raw Screens Into Apple-Grade Visuals in Seconds

Here’s the core value prop we built around:

Create App Store screenshots that look professionally designed — in seconds.

Our internal brief was brutally simple:

• Remove every part of the manual design workflow.

• Guarantee Apple-approved pixel accuracy.

• Output clean, consistent, conversion-driving frames.

• Build the entire MVP in a week.

• Price it for fast validation.

I wrote the landing page copy, and built it using Framer. The most important thing was for the landing copy to reflect the frustration and the transformation:

• Ultra-clean screenshots

• Photorealistic 3D iPhone mockups

• Feature-focused headlines generated by AI

• Device-perfect exports

• Lock screen + Home Screen widgets

• Reject-proof sizing

• Built for indie developers, studios, agencies

And importantly:

Works entirely in the browser. No plugins. No Figma. No scripts.

Upload 1–6 raw screenshots → describe your app → get a full screenshot set in seconds.

That’s it.

The Lean Launch Approach: Build → Ship → Market Manually → Scale What Works

This challenge is not about building perfect software.
It’s about shortening the path from idea to revenue.

Our internal stack for every launch is the same:

• I would come up with a brand name or SEO optimized name

• Purchase the domain from Namecheap

• Connect it to Cloudflare

• Custom-coded landing page or Framer for fast launch (I have been using v0 and codex to launch these landing pages fast)

• Quantas (our internal privacy-compliant analytics tool)

• Manual distribution: X, Reddit, Bluesky and relevant channels. I spend every free time I have to engage online and get into the conversations related to our products. This can be scaled but I find the results are better when it's a human talking to another human. Scale it down to one to one interactions for higher conversions.

• High-intent directories

• Product Hunt

• TAAFT (There’s An AI For That)

• No SEO-ready content (We skipped this because SEO takes time to generate traffic, and we want to validate it with paying users.)

• No long funnels (Landing page to signup to payment, or landing page to payment)

• No paid ads until organic signals appear

The real constraint is time.
So everything must be essential, not optional.

What Happened When We Launched: The Numbers That Actually Matter

We launched without an email list, without a brand, and without paid traffic.

In under two weeks:

401 unique users
619 tracked interactions
Traffic from 20+ countries (80%+ Americans)
Top channels:

• TAAFT (13% direct feature traffic)

• AWA newsletter

• ChatGPT mentions (We were able to get ChatGPT mentions and LLM traffic after a week)

• Google organic

• Product Hunt

• StackShare

The striking part?

0 returning users
0 revenue

And that’s the point.

This is why we do this challenge.

Traffic isn’t validation.
Paying customers are validation.

The goal of Week 1 was never revenue it was market truth.

What We Learned: Competitors, Creators, and Crowded Markets Don’t Care About Your Pain

The biggest lesson:

A painful problem does not equal a viable business.

For Nick, this workflow was torture.
For the market, that pain was already solved in multiple ways:

• Agencies already have internal templates

• Indie designers sell premium mockup kits

• Established tools dominate ASO workflows

• Large Twitter/X designers have huge followings

• The category is crowded and high-quality

Our wedge could only be:

• Price

• Simplicity

• Speed of output

Since we were only building for a week, we avoided feature bloat and locked in a simple pricing plan:

Lifetime license — $79
Pay once. Keep it forever.

It positions us under premium design kits while staying attractive to solo indie developers who hate recurring costs.

The Core Takeaway From Week 1

Shipping fast forces reality to surface early.

We didn’t build a breakout hit.
But we built something valuable:

1. A proven pipeline for rapid development

2. A reusable marketing checklist

3. A validated pricing strategy

4. Insight into competitive ASO tools

5. A working template for future launches

6. A system for generating and analyzing traffic instantly

Most founders spend months building version 1.
We learned more in seven days than most teams learn in a quarter.

What’s Next: 51 More Builds, 51 More Experiments

Every week will refine the system.
Every launch will sharpen positioning.
Every product will become a data point.

Some will make money on day one.
Some will flop.
All will teach us how to get better.

But this first project showed us exactly what we needed:

• Where price matters

• Where workflows break

• How distribution reacts

• What “crowded market” actually means

• How to evaluate a niche before committing engineering time

• Where to focus on lean marketing vs. build complexity

52 weeks is the perfect forcing function: speed makes everything honest.