DEV Community: Stanislav M.

I Can Build Apps. But I Have No Idea How to Market Them.

Stanislav M. — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:07:03 +0000

I've noticed something interesting while reading posts from other indie developers. Some people seem to genuinely enjoy marketing. They publish something almost every day, participate in discussions, build their personal brands and always have another idea for attracting attention. Sometimes I look through their profiles and can't even figure out what product they are actually building. Maybe the product is somewhere in there, but the marketing seems to be doing much better than the development.

And then there are people like me, somewhere on the opposite side of this situation. I'm a QA engineer and indie developer, and I genuinely enjoy building things. I can spend an entire evening fixing a bug that probably affects three people, improving some small feature or writing tests for something that was already working. It might sound strange, but I find this much more interesting than trying to convince someone to look at what I've made.

The problem is that I'm not building applications just to keep them on my computer. I actually want people to use them, find problems, suggest improvements and maybe even enjoy them. But somehow, while I'm developing a project, marketing always feels like something I can deal with later. First I need to finish this feature, then fix a few bugs, then improve the interface, then make sure everything works properly. There is always one more thing that seems more important than telling people about the product.

Eventually, the application is ready. I publish it, check that everything works, look at the store page and feel reasonably happy with the result. Then comes the uncomfortable part. Nobody knows it exists, and apparently Google Play doesn't send a personal invitation to every potential user just because I finally finished another project.

So I start thinking about marketing, usually much later than I should. I open Reddit, LinkedIn or some other platform and try to find a discussion where I could contribute something useful. Maybe I write a comment, maybe publish a post about the development process or try to explain why I built a particular feature. Sometimes I get a few reactions or an interesting conversation, but most of the time it feels like I'm leaving little traces of my existence around the internet and hoping someone will eventually notice.

The funny thing is that I can spend hours investigating a technical problem without getting tired, but trying to write a promotional post can take an entire evening. I keep wondering whether the text sounds too much like advertising, whether anybody actually cares and whether I'm just annoying people who came to discuss something completely different. By the time I've finished thinking about all this, I could probably have fixed another bug.

I also understand that this approach isn't particularly smart. Marketing probably shouldn't begin after the product is finished, and waiting for people to discover an application by accident isn't much of a strategy. But knowing that something is important and actually enjoying doing it are two different things. I know exercise is useful too, but that doesn't mean I wake up every morning excited about running ten kilometres.

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm approaching this from the wrong direction. Maybe I shouldn't think about marketing as a separate activity that starts when development ends. Maybe it should be a normal part of building a product, just like testing or collecting feedback. The problem is that I still haven't found a comfortable way to make it part of my routine without feeling that I'm spending more time talking about software than actually creating it.

And of course, I don't have a budget for advertising, so I can't simply pay someone to solve this problem for me. I'm building several projects independently, and any money I could spend on promotion would have to compete with plenty of other expenses. For now, my main resources are time, patience and a slightly unreasonable belief that if I keep making useful things, someone will eventually find them.

I'm not looking for some magical growth formula or advice about becoming an influencer. I'm genuinely curious how other developers deal with this, especially those who enjoy programming much more than marketing. Do you promote your projects while you're still building them, or do you also leave everything until release? What has actually helped you find users without paying for advertising, and how much time do you spend on promotion compared to development?

I'd be especially interested in hearing from people who were terrible at marketing in the beginning but eventually found an approach that worked for them. Because right now, I'm pretty good at building applications that nobody knows about, and I'd like to improve at least the second part of that equation.

I Moved to Portugal and Somehow Ended Up Building a Language App

Stanislav M. — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:41:06 +0000

I Moved to Portugal and Somehow Ended Up Building a Language Learning App

When I moved to Portugal, I started learning Portuguese. I thought finding a good language learning app would be the easy part, considering how many of them are available today. But I quickly noticed something annoying: a lot of the Portuguese learning materials I found were focused on Brazilian Portuguese.

There's nothing wrong with Brazilian Portuguese, of course. But I live in Portugal, and I wanted to learn the words, expressions and pronunciation I actually hear around me. Sometimes the differences are small, sometimes they're quite noticeable, especially when you're a beginner and already struggling to understand what people are saying.

I'm a QA engineer, and I also develop Android apps and small games in my free time. So naturally, instead of spending more time looking for a suitable learning tool, I decided to build my own. Because apparently I don't know how to solve small problems in a normal way.

That's how Retelingo started.

It was supposed to be a simple vocabulary app

My original idea was pretty straightforward. I wanted something where I could learn useful words, practice remembering them and review them regularly. I wasn't interested in building another huge language learning platform with hundreds of features, complicated learning paths and endless notifications. Just a practical tool I could use every day.

I decided to use active recall and spaced repetition, with FSRS handling the review scheduling. Instead of simply showing the same words over and over again, the app should help you remember them and decide when it's time to review them again. It's not some magical method that makes you fluent in a month, but it gives vocabulary practice a bit more structure.

Another important decision was offline support. I don't think an application needs a permanent internet connection just to show vocabulary cards and remember your progress. Retelingo downloads dictionaries when needed, but the actual learning process works offline. I also didn't want mandatory registration, because creating an account just to memorize a few Portuguese words seems a bit unnecessary to me.

At this point, everything still sounded relatively simple. Unfortunately, the development part had other plans.

The app was easier than the dictionaries

One thing I underestimated was how much work the language content would require. Writing the application logic is one problem, but maintaining dictionaries across different languages is something else entirely. Translations need to make sense, regional differences matter, pronunciation isn't always straightforward, and the same word can have several meanings depending on the context.

And when you start adding more languages, all those problems multiply. It isn't enough to generate a large collection of vocabulary and call it finished. You also need to think about content quality, consistency between dictionaries and what happens when the content changes after people have already started learning it.

For example, imagine someone has been studying a word for several weeks and already has review history associated with it. Now you discover that its translation needs fixing, or the dictionary structure needs updating. Ideally, you should be able to improve the content without destroying the user's existing progress. These are the kinds of problems that aren't particularly exciting to show in screenshots, but they matter quite a lot.

I'm still working on improving the dictionaries and expanding language support. And the more I work on the content, the more I realize that adding another language is probably the easy part. Making sure it's actually useful for someone learning that language is much harder.

Being a QA engineer doesn't make development easier

There's another funny thing about building your own software when your main job is testing other people's products. You already know too many ways something can go wrong, and unfortunately, you can't really ignore that knowledge when working on your own app.

Every relatively simple feature creates a bunch of additional questions. What happens if someone closes the application during an update? What if imported vocabulary contains broken data? What if the phone is offline, the dictionary version changes, or some local data becomes corrupted? And, of course, what happens when someone uses the application in a completely different way than I expected?

This is probably why my small projects tend to become much larger than planned. I start with a feature, then find edge cases, then write tests, then discover that the original implementation needs changing. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I occasionally remember that I was supposed to be making a language learning app.

And yes, I still manage to introduce plenty of bugs myself. Working in QA doesn't seem to provide any special immunity against that.

Where the project is now

Retelingo has grown beyond my original idea of learning European Portuguese. It now supports multiple languages, with more content and improvements still in development. I'm trying to keep the learning process simple while making the underlying system reliable enough to handle new dictionaries, updates and different learning scenarios.

I don't know yet how far the project will go. I'm developing it alongside my other apps and games, and there are still plenty of things I want to improve. What started as a personal problem has become an interesting combination of language learning, software engineering, content management and QA.

If you're curious about the project, you can find it here: https://morozhenko.com/rt/dv/po. I'm the developer, and I'm interested in feedback, especially from people learning European Portuguese or working on similar offline applications. I'm much more interested in hearing what doesn't work than collecting polite comments saying everything looks nice.

I'm also curious how common this situation is among other developers. Have you ever started building a small tool to solve your own problem, only to discover that the supposedly simple idea was hiding a much bigger project?