Getting the downloads was the easy part. Retention is the real game.

Ayotemi Adediwura — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:36:09 +0000

I'm Ayotemi, co-founder of The Rhyme Game, a freestyle rap training app. In my last post I broke down how we hit 400K downloads in four months by making the product generate its own content.
But downloads are vanity if people open the app once and never come back. So this post is about the harder half of the problem: retention. Here's what we learned trying to turn a viral spike into a habit.
A download is a stranger, not a user
When our content took off, tens of thousands of people installed the app in a matter of days. That felt amazing for about a week, until we looked at the real question: how many of them came back tomorrow?
A one-time viral hit gives you a flood of strangers. Retention is the work of turning strangers into regulars. None of the acquisition stuff helps you here. It's a completely different design problem, and we underestimated it at first.
What actually pulled people back
We stopped thinking about features and started thinking about reasons to return. Three things moved the needle more than anything else:

Streaks. The single most effective mechanic we added. Once someone has a streak going, they don't want to break it. It reframes the app from "a thing I use when I feel like it" to "a thing I do every day." The psychology is almost unfair. People will open the app just to keep a number from resetting.
Visible progression. Levels, achievements, a running count of how many bars you've spat. People need to see that using the app made them better at something. A freestyle session that vanishes into nothing has no pull. A freestyle session that ticks a level up and unlocks a badge gives you a reason to do it again.
A genuinely useful tool inside the game. We built a rhyme dictionary into the app: tap any word and get rhymes, syllable counts, related words. That turned out to be a retention driver on its own, because now the app is useful even when you're not in the mood to play. Utility brings people back on the days the game alone wouldn't. The lesson: acquisition is a spike, retention is a system Acquisition is an event. You do a thing, you get a wave. Retention is a system that has to run every single day whether you're paying attention or not. The mechanics above aren't features we bolted on. They're the reason a download three months ago is still opening the app today. If you're building anything people are supposed to use repeatedly, the questions that matter are:
1. What's the reason to come back tomorrow? If you can't answer that in one sentence, that's the work.
2. Does the user see their own progress? Invisible progress doesn't retain. Make it visible.
3. Is there a reason to open the app on a low-motivation day? A utility, a streak, a small daily thing. Something that doesn't require them to be in the perfect mood.
4. Are you designing for the spike or the system? They are not the same project. Where we are now The habit loop is what turned a viral moment into an actual business with paying subscribers, not just a download chart that spiked and flatlined. If you want to see how the streak-and-progression loop feels in practice, The Rhyme Game is live at www.therhymegame.com. We also post the content it generates on TikTok @the.rhyme.game and Instagram @therhymegame. Curious what's worked for retention on your own products, drop it in the comments.

How we hit 400K downloads in 4 months with basically no ad budget

Ayotemi Adediwura — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:30:08 +0000

I'm Ayotemi, one of the co-founders of The Rhyme Game. Four months ago we launched a freestyle rap training app. Since then it's crossed 400,000 downloads and 60 million views across platforms, and we've spent almost nothing on ads.
I want to break down the one decision that actually made that happen, because it's the kind of thing that applies to a lot of products, not just ours.
The problem with most apps
Most apps launch, then go looking for distribution. You build the thing, then you scramble for ads, influencers, an agency, a growth hack. Distribution is a second project you start after the product is done.
We flipped that. The distribution is built into the product.
Make the product generate its own content
Here's the core idea. The Rhyme Game is a freestyle trainer: you pick a beat, the app feeds you rhyme prompts on a grid, and you freestyle along in real time. The important part isn't the gameplay. It's that every session a user plays can be recorded in the app and exported as a finished vertical video.
Think about what that means. A user opens the app, freestyles for 30 seconds, hits export, and now they're holding a complete TikTok. Not raw footage they have to edit. A finished, postable clip, with the gameplay on screen and their voice over the beat.
So every user is also a content creator, and every piece of content is an ad for the app that the user wanted to make and post, because it makes them look good (or funny). We didn't have to convince anyone to market us. The product hands them a reason.
Why it actually spreads
A few things stacked up:
• The barrier to make content is near zero. Most user-generated-content campaigns fail because the user has to think of a concept. Here the concept is the product. Open, freestyle, post.
• The bad ones perform too. A clean freestyle is impressive. A terrible one is hilarious. Both get shared. The failure case is still content, which is rare and very powerful.
• It's inherently visual and native to short-form. The output is already in the exact format the platforms reward.
We seeded it ourselves early with a simple split-screen format, the player up top and the gameplay below. A few of those crossed 150K–220K views organically. Then users started making their own, and the loop took over.
The takeaways if you're building something
You might not have a freestyle app, but the principle travels:
1. Ask what your product could hand the user that they'd want to share. Not a referral link. An artifact. Something the act of using the product naturally produces.
2. Lower the creation barrier to zero. If the user has to think, edit, or design, most won't. If the product outputs the finished thing, they will.
3. Let the imperfect output ship. The mistakes are often more shareable than the wins. Don't hide them.
4. Seed it yourself first. Show people the format. Then get out of the way.
Distribution you have to buy runs out when the money does. Distribution baked into the product compounds.
One honest aside
Growing fast in public has a funny side effect: someone clones you. There's now a copycat riding our name and our search traffic, which is its own strange milestone. If you go looking, the real one is The Rhyme Game — that's us.
If you want to see the loop in action, the app is live at www.therhymegame.com, and we post the content it generates on TikTok @the.rhyme.game and Instagram @therhymegame.
Happy to answer anything about the growth side in the comments.

DEV Community: Ayotemi Adediwura

Getting the downloads was the easy part. Retention is the real game.

How we hit 400K downloads in 4 months with basically no ad budget