Last Week
Last week was about marketing preparation after the App Store approval finally landed. Android was already live on Google Play, iOS had cleared review, and the center of gravity moved away from building the MVP toward making Shokken look trustworthy enough for real operators to evaluate.
That meant working on the surfaces around the app: the website, app store listings, screenshots, Google/search presence, social profiles, and physical flyers for local outreach. The product itself existed, but the launch trail still needed to look coherent. If someone heard the name, searched for it, scanned a flyer, opened an app listing, or checked a social profile, they needed to find something that felt maintained instead of half-abandoned.
This week, that work turned into the first real marketing artifact: a short-form vertical promotional video. It is the first 9:16 marketing video I have ever produced, and it pushed me into a surprisingly technical workflow for making polished product content without becoming a full-time video editor.
From Shipping The App To Selling The App
Shokken is now available on both Google Play and the iOS App Store.
That still feels strange to write. After the long iOS review loop, the first publication finally happened, and then I immediately found a bug. So the first post-approval lesson was simple: App Store approval does not mean the app is frozen forever, but every new build still goes through review.
Thankfully, the update path was much faster than the initial submission. The bug-fix build moved through review in less than forty-eight hours, and once it entered active review, the approval itself only took an hour or two. That matches what other developers had said: the first approval is the painful gate; later updates are usually easier unless the app changes substantially or trips a new policy issue.
So the app is live. Anyone can search for Shokken, spelled S H O K K E N, on Google Play or the App Store and install it.
Now the hard part changes.
It is very easy, as an engineer, to believe that building the tool is most of the work. It is not. Building the app may be ten or fifteen percent of what makes the product succeed. The rest is getting the right people to notice it, understand it, trust it, and decide that trying it is worth their time.
That is uncomfortable for me because it is new territory. I know how to build the app. I know how to chase down bugs, wire backend flows, harden CI, and argue with store review. Marketing is different. It is less deterministic, less immediately testable, and more dependent on trust, repetition, timing, and packaging.
But it is now the work.
What does it mean in English?
The app is built and approved. That does not mean people will use it.
For Shokken to matter, restaurants and other waitlist-heavy operators need to hear about it, believe it is real, understand what problem it solves, and feel comfortable trying it. That requires more than code. It requires flyers, app store screenshots, videos, social profiles, pricing clarity, a usable website, and a sales story that can survive a busy restaurant manager’s attention span.
This week was about creating the first pieces of that story.
The most visible one is a short vertical promotional video. The most practical one is a printed flyer I can bring into local restaurants. The broader strategy is to combine local in-person outreach with social media presence so Shokken can look credible when someone searches for it after hearing the pitch.
Nerdy Details
The first update after approval was fast
The iOS app finally being live did not mean I was done with App Store review.
Right after publication, I found a bug and pushed a new build. That could have been worrying after the initial approval process, because the first review took multiple rounds and several weeks of back-and-forth. But the update behaved very differently.
The new build still had to go through review. Apple still reviewed it before distribution. But the timeline was short: less than forty-eight hours from submission to approval, and once the app was actually being reviewed, the final decision came in roughly an hour or two.
That is a major operational difference.
The first approval is a product and policy inspection. Apple is trying to decide whether the app is acceptable for the store at all. Later updates still matter, but unless the app changes substantially or introduces new policy-sensitive behavior, the process can be much less painful.
For Shokken, that means the iOS release process is no longer the giant unknown it was a few weeks ago. It is still a gate. It is still slower than deploying backend code. But it is no longer an existential blocker.
That gives me enough confidence to shift attention toward the launch surface.
Local outreach starts with the right targets
The marketing plan has two paths: in-person and digital.
The in-person path starts in Las Vegas. That is both convenient and strategically useful. Vegas has a dense restaurant scene, and some restaurants here are busy at odd hours in a way that makes waitlist tooling obviously relevant.
I mentioned one of my favorite sushi restaurants in the transcript. It is the kind of place that seems busy no matter when I go: not just Friday night, not just dinner rush, but weird mid-afternoon hours too. That kind of constant demand is exactly where waitlist tools become visible. The restaurant already uses a waitlist product, and seeing that guest-side experience was part of the original inspiration for Shokken. I believed there were parts of that flow that could be improved.
Those are the kinds of places I need to find.
I cannot walk into every restaurant in Las Vegas. That would waste time and annoy people. The target list needs to be filtered:
- restaurants that are visibly busy
- places where customers complain about waiting
- operators already using some manual or digital waitlist process
- businesses where the host stand is under pressure
- restaurants that are successful enough for wait management to matter
The pain has to be real. If a restaurant never has a wait, Shokken is not solving an urgent problem for them. If the complaint pattern is “great food, long wait,” then the product has something concrete to talk about.
Door-to-door sales is awkward but useful
Showing up in person is probably going to be awkward.
I am aware of the dynamic. The person at the door is likely a host or employee, not the owner or decision maker. They may see marketers all the time. They may be busy. They may not want to hear about another product. They may not have any incentive to carry my message to the person who can actually approve a new tool.
That means the in-person visit may fail often.
But it still has advantages. I am not a hired salesperson with shallow product knowledge. I built the product. If someone asks a technical or operational question, I can answer it. If they raise a concern, I can separate “that is already handled” from “that is a real product gap.” If they want to try it, I can support them directly.
That changes the pitch.
The goal is not to close a contract on the spot. The goal is to create enough interest and trust that the operator tries the app or agrees to a follow-up. For early users, I can offer a level of service a larger company probably would not: setup help, first-shift monitoring, and direct support from the person who wrote the system.
That “white glove” offer matters. If a restaurant is willing to trust Shokken during a busy shift, I want to be there with a laptop, connectivity, and the ability to fix or diagnose issues immediately. That reduces their risk and gives me real feedback from the first serious deployments.
The flyer is now a real artifact
The physical flyer is no longer just a rough prototype.
I printed a double-sided flyer on high-quality paper at home using a photo printer. The paper has a premium feel, the print quality is good, and the final object looks like something I can hand to a business without apologizing for it.
That matters more than I expected.
The flyer is the portable version of the product story. It has to survive a short interaction and continue working after I leave. The front side carries the headline, visual proof, and live QR codes. The QR codes let someone test the guest-side waitlist flow immediately. SMS is enabled for those demo flows, so the recipient can actually experience the notification path instead of merely reading about it.
The back side carries the pitch:
- what the app does
- why it matters
- pricing
- how to start
- what extra local support I can provide
The local support piece is important for Vegas. I can offer to show up for setup, help the staff get comfortable, and stay available during the first busy shift. That is not scalable forever, but it is exactly the kind of high-touch support that early customers deserve.
The flyer also forces clarity. A website can sprawl. A conversation can wander. A one-page handout has limited space. If the value proposition does not fit there, it is probably not sharp enough yet.
In-person outreach may still fail
The flyer does not guarantee anything.
Restaurants are noisy, busy environments. The person who receives the handout may not care. The manager may not be present. The staff may have been trained to ignore unsolicited pitches. The restaurant may already have a system they tolerate, even if it is not ideal.
There is also general marketing fatigue. People are flooded with ads, spam, cold emails, flyers, and pitches. Showing up with one more tool is not automatically welcome.
That is why I am not relying only on in-person visits.
Local outreach gives me a chance to talk directly to likely users, learn from their objections, and demonstrate that I am standing behind the product. But it has limited scale and uncertain access to decision makers. Social and digital channels are the parallel path.
Social media is not just reach
The obvious reason to use social media is reach.
I can physically visit restaurants in Las Vegas. Social media can reach people outside walking distance. It can expose the product to restaurants, event organizers, churches, and other waitlist-heavy operators I would never find manually.
But raw reach is not the main thing I am counting on.
The Internet is too crowded. Uploading a short video does not mean anyone will see it. Every platform has an ocean of content, and without a large budget or an existing audience, organic discovery is uncertain.
The more reliable value of social media, at least early on, is credibility.
If I walk into a restaurant and hand someone a flyer, they may search for Shokken after I leave. If they find a website, app store listings, a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, a LinkedIn page, and other maintained profiles, the product looks more real. If they find nothing, it looks like a fly-by-night operation.
That does not mean social media has to become a high-volume content factory immediately. It does need to exist, look intentional, and contain enough useful material that someone checking the product can see signs of life.
The second value is organic discovery. I know there is at least some demand for simple waitlist tooling because people have reached out before looking for exactly that. The hard part is being discoverable when those people search.
The product positioning gap is real
One thing I noticed while looking at app store search results is that the waitlist category has a gap.
There are two broad types of apps.
The first group looks like hobby projects: weak assets, thin descriptions, missing screenshots, old updates, and little sign that someone is still maintaining the product. Some of them might technically work, but they do not inspire much confidence.
The second group is the opposite: large, heavy platforms. These products may include waitlist features, but they also wrap those features inside a broader restaurant operations suite. That can mean contracts, sales calls, POS integrations, menu systems, ordering workflows, and a lot of organizational commitment.
Shokken is trying to sit between those extremes.
The value proposition is intentionally narrow: if you want a waitlist, download this app and use it. You do not need to plug into a larger platform. You do not need to talk to sales. You do not need to sign a contract before discovering the price. The app is free for the core workflow, and paid access is only required for the communication-heavy features that cost real money to operate.
That positioning matters because “contact sales” creates friction. I understand why larger companies do it. Their pricing may depend on scale, integrations, onboarding, support, and account size. But as a user, I hate it. If the price is hidden, I assume the process is going to be expensive and slow.
Shokken should feel different: clear price, clear purpose, immediate download, immediate trial.
SMS keeps the product geographically constrained
Social media can reach the world. Shokken cannot responsibly serve the whole world yet.
The constraint is messaging.
Shokken uses SMS notifications, and programmatic messaging is not something every country treats casually. In the United States, I already went through the compliance work needed to send transactional notification messages from a toll-free number. That process had setup cost, ongoing number cost, and usage cost, but it was manageable.
Other countries can be much more expensive and much more complicated.
In the transcript, I mentioned looking into Singapore as an example. The costs were far higher than what I dealt with in the U.S., and that was only one country. Each additional market can bring a different regulatory framework, registration process, sender requirement, and recurring fee.
That is before even talking about spam risk. If the app allowed unrestricted global messaging, the abuse surface would become much larger. Messaging fraud can get expensive quickly.
So for now, Shokken is scoped to North America, practically the United States first. That affects marketing. A video can go everywhere, but the call to action needs to be aimed at the market I can actually support.
Short-form video is its own skill stack
The most visible new asset this week is the first short-form vertical promotional video.
That was harder than I expected.
These weekly development videos are simple by design. I talk to the camera. I do not heavily edit. I do not try to make them polished advertising pieces. That is part of their value: they are a record of the work, not a cinematic production.
A product video is different.
Customers expect polish. They expect pacing, music, animation, clean text, and a sense that someone cared. A rough talking-head video can be fine for a devlog. It is not the right wrapper for a commercial product pitch.
The problem is that motion graphics tools are a real discipline. Whether it is Adobe tools, DaVinci Resolve, or another editing environment, producing a good short-form ad requires learning concepts, timelines, animation curves, typography, composition, exports, licensing, and platform formats.
I do not have weeks to become a motion graphics person.
I also do not have a budget to hand this to a professional team. So I needed a workflow that let me produce something acceptable without making video editing my new full-time job.
Remotion made video feel like software
The solution I landed on is Remotion.
Remotion lets you generate video from React components. Instead of manually editing a timeline in a visual video tool, you describe the animation in code. The rendering engine turns that into a video file you can upload to platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X.
The key idea is familiar if you have built web interfaces. A browser already knows how to render and animate text, images, layout, and transitions. Remotion takes that kind of web animation model and turns the output into a video.
That is powerful for a developer because the asset becomes reproducible. The video is not just a pile of manual edits. It can live in the repository. It can be adjusted, rendered again, versioned, and treated more like a build artifact.
It is not automatically easy. I do not know React deeply, and the video still needs design judgment. But it moves the work into a world I can reason about: files, components, parameters, rendering, iteration, and debugging.
That is a much better fit for me than starting from scratch in a traditional motion graphics package.
The AI-assisted design loop was useful, but not magic
The video was not a one-shot AI miracle.
The rough workflow looked like this:
- Use the existing repository and product materials to create a design brief.
- Generate concepts for a short promotional video.
- Iterate on the visual direction until the frames and motion felt usable.
- Export the design/spec into the local codebase.
- Turn that spec into a Remotion project.
- Render the final video.
- Debug the mismatches between the design output and the local render.
- Add music and tune the timing.
The AI tools helped most in the parts where I lacked fluency: React, motion design structure, and generating a first pass that was better than a blank page. But I still had to babysit the process.
There were mistakes. There were translation gaps between design and implementation. There were places where the generated spec did not map perfectly into the final Remotion render. Getting from a concept to a finished video still took several days.
That is still a huge win.
Could I have learned enough traditional motion graphics to make the same video in a week? Maybe eventually, but probably not on the first try. With the programmatic workflow, I got from zero to a usable short-form product video in about a week.
That is the practical value.
Music licensing was another hidden problem
Video also needs music, and music has licensing traps.
I learned quickly that “royalty free” is not the same as “safe for commercial product marketing.” A marketing video for Shokken is a commercial use. Some libraries allow personal or creator use but require a more expensive commercial license once the content promotes a product.
That matters because I do not want the first marketing asset to carry a licensing problem.
The solution this time was generated music through ElevenLabs. I paid for the service, generated several variations, picked the one that fit the video best, and tuned the timing so the music supported the motion.
The cost difference was dramatic. Instead of paying a large commercial licensing fee or spending hours hunting for a track with acceptable terms, I could generate multiple candidate tracks quickly and use one that fit the piece.
That does not remove every responsibility. I still need to understand the license attached to the generated output and make sure it is suitable for commercial use. But it made the problem solvable at the scale of one person trying to launch a product.
The uncomfortable truth about these tools
I know there is a lot of discomfort around AI-generated creative tools.
I understand why. There are real questions around labor, training data, creative markets, and what happens when these systems get used at industrial scale. I am not trying to resolve that debate here.
What I can say is that, as one person trying to launch a real product without a marketing department, these tools let me do things I could not otherwise do.
I could not hire a motion graphics team. I could not hire a composer. I could not spend a month becoming proficient in every tool required to make a short promotional video. But I could use a code-based video renderer, AI-assisted design iteration, and generated music to produce a first marketing asset that is good enough to start learning from.
That is not the same as replacing a professional creative team. A professional team would make something better. But “better” was not the available option. The available options were:
- produce nothing
- produce something painfully amateur
- spend too much money
- spend too much time
- build a workflow that gets me to acceptable quality
I chose the last one.
The next step is a real sales rehearsal
The video and flyer are only artifacts. They still need to be used.
Before I walk into restaurants, I need to finish the practical pitch:
- the opening line
- the thirty-second explanation
- the demo sequence
- the QR-code test flow
- the pricing explanation
- the first-shift support offer
- the answer to “why not use the tool we already have?”
- the answer to “what happens if this breaks during service?”
That needs rehearsal. I do not want to show up and fumble through the app while someone is busy. The demo should be predictable, short, and focused on the pain the operator already recognizes.
I also need a smoke test pass on the demo process itself. The live QR codes should work. SMS should work. The app store listing should be current. The website should support the pitch. The social profiles should not look empty. If someone tries to validate Shokken after I leave, the trail should hold together.
That is the remaining preparation before I start knocking on doors.
Next Week
Next week is about finishing the marketing package and rehearsing the demo.
I need to tighten the pitch, run a smoke test across the live app and QR-code demo flow, make sure the flyer and video point to the right places, and finish enough of the social and website surface that a restaurant operator can evaluate Shokken without falling into a half-built page.
After that, the plan is to hit the road in Las Vegas and start showing the product to actual restaurants.