Green Noise App · B2C · green noise sleep sounds app
Name the app after the keyword and use the App Store autocomplete phrase as subtitle
Reached #1 for 'green noise'; still #3 with little upkeep
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- launch
In their words
Steve Young - Beginners Guide to Buying & Selling Apps 2026
Joseph ChoiSo what is the actual mechanism to like implement ASO? Are you just changing the title? I've I've heard from some people that basically the subtitle and the title of the app is like 80% of ASO, is that true?
Steve YoungYeah, 100%. That's all I pay attention to, right? So like here, I'm going to pull up Green Noise and I'll show you, cuz one of our apps is still number three for green noise. So when when I first launched this app of ours, we called it Green Noise App, and then the subtitle was Green Noise for Better Sleep, because if you do the autofill result, it just says green noise. And then our keyword was green, comma, noise, comma, app, comma, free, launched. And I was, you know, like I know a lot of tricks with ASO, so like that's that's sort of my advantage to it. We were number one for a few time, but I just stopped paying attention to this app. Still generates some revenue, but not a whole lot. But that's it. Like, like you said—
Joseph ChoiSo the words separated by commas, that was the subtitle, you said?
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More from this episode
- Buy an app that ranks #1 but charges $2, then add a $60/year hard paywallRevenue up from $1-2K to $8-10K a month with the same downloads
- Remove the X from the paywall so users must start a trialTrial starts doubled from 6% to 13%; trial-to-paid unchanged; some one-star reviews
- Name your new app after a keyword with ~30 searches that nobody uses in their title#1 in week one, 100 downloads a day, $1,600 first month, ~$20K MRR years later
- Pick keywords where the top 3 apps have few reviews and lack the keyword in their titleUsed to launch and buy apps that reached #1; no pooled numbers
- Target 24 more versions of the keyword you already rank #1 for, and cut Apple Ads
- Buy a profitable app with a 10-year loan and pay it back from the app's profitMoney back in 3-4 months on one purchase; example leaves ~$5K a month after loan payments
- Buy apps that already get organic downloads but earn too little or skip a channelBest buys fit this; one $18K purchase without it flopped
- Try Meta ads on a small organic app, including a hard paywallOnly ~$1 revenue per install; economics didn't work
- Send Meta sign-up, paywall-view and checkout events while still optimizing for purchasesGuest says the ad account got smarter; no numbers
- Show paid Instagram and Facebook users a paywall with no X; let organic users close itReported to perform a lot better; no numbers shared
- Switch from a closable paywall with no trial to a hard paywall with a free trialPerformed a little better; no numbers
- Launch a good-enough app, and only finish it if downloads show upSpeaker's standing process; no numbers
- Rank for a niche keyword first, then climb to broader onesOutranked Canva on a keyword
- Build just the viral feature as a TestFlight and let creators film it
Tags: app-store, autocomplete, subtitle, keyword-field