Last Week

Last week, I broadened the marketing surface for Shokken. Door-to-door restaurant visits had produced useful conversations, but they were too slow and draining to be my only way of finding customers. I started looking for more targeted and more scalable ways to reach restaurant operators.

This week, that broad idea became two concrete areas of work: improving how Shokken appears in the app stores and publishing short product videos for the people who might actually use it.

Finding the First Marketing Bottleneck

Shokken is available in the United States on Android and iOS. Building the app turned out to be the easier part. Marketing it, distributing it, and persuading people to use it is a discipline of its own.

I want more of that discovery to happen organically through the app stores and Shokken’s online presence instead of depending entirely on in-person restaurant visits. But before I can improve that path, I need to separate it into stages and work on the first problem in front of me.

Someone has to find Shokken in a search or encounter it elsewhere. The app-store listing then has to give that person a reason to look more closely and download it. Only after the download can I learn whether people start using the app and eventually become paying customers.

Those later stages matter, but I am not there yet. My immediate work is at the top of the funnel: creating a stronger online presence and making the store listing more effective.

Product Videos for Customers

I have started a separate YouTube channel for short, customer-facing videos about Shokken. These are meant to be quick tutorials, feature demonstrations, and practical tips rather than long development updates. I have committed to publishing one every Thursday.

The distinction between the two channels matters. This development vlog is a journal of what it is like to build and market the product. It is for people interested in that process. A restaurant operator evaluating Shokken probably has a more immediate set of questions: Is this a real product? What does it look like? How would I use it?

The product channel gives those customers direct answers without asking them to follow the entire development story. It also creates a visible body of work around the app—something a person can find when they search for Shokken and want to understand what stands behind it.

Here is one of the customer-facing product videos:

A weekly cadence is partly a distribution strategy and partly a commitment device. I have maintained these Saturday development updates for nearly two years. I now want to bring the same consistency to concise product videos, while keeping their audience and purpose separate from the vlog.

What Does It Mean in English?

An app-store page is a storefront. Being listed does not mean that the right customer will notice it, understand it, or trust it enough to walk through the door.

The search terms and description help someone find the storefront and decide whether it is relevant. The screenshots have to tell the product’s story quickly. The product videos provide more evidence that the app exists, is cared for, and has someone standing behind it.

None of those things guarantees a download. They remove different reasons for a potential customer to leave before understanding what Shokken does.

That is why I do not want to jump ahead and optimize everything at once. If too few people encounter the listing, I first need to improve discovery. If they reach the listing but do not download, I need to improve how it communicates. Questions about continued use and paid conversion come after those earlier steps are working well enough to measure.

Nerdy Details

App store optimization is product communication

Until now, Shokken’s store presence has been fairly generic. I have not applied much strategy to the wording, keywords, or screenshots. That leaves a lot of room to improve how the listing attracts attention and explains the product.

App store optimization is not simply adding more keywords. The different pieces work together:

  • Search terms help the listing appear for relevant queries.
  • The name and short description help a browsing customer decide whether to click.
  • Screenshots show what the app does and make the value understandable at a glance.
  • The full description answers questions for someone considering a download.

I am currently working through those pieces. The goal is to see whether a clearer store presence produces more organic traffic and downloads before I move deeper into activation and paid conversion.

The available market is intentionally limited

Shokken’s current app-store distribution is limited to the United States. SMS messaging is a significant part of the product, and I have not addressed the compliance requirements for distributing it in other regions.

That smaller geographic surface is one possible reason for low traffic, but it does not remove the need to improve the listing. It simply means I need to judge the results within the market where the app is currently available rather than treating global reach as the immediate solution.

Each conversion deserves its own question

It is tempting to describe marketing as one problem: get more customers. In practice, it is a chain of different decisions.

Can someone find Shokken? Does the listing persuade them to download it? After downloading it, do they start using it? Does that use eventually turn into a paid relationship?

If I collapse all of those questions into one number, I will not know what to change. Working through them in order gives me a better chance of learning whether the problem is discovery, communication, onboarding, ongoing value, or something later in the journey.

Next Week

The immediate work is already underway: improve Shokken’s app-store presence and keep the Thursday product-video cadence going. Once I have a better foundation for discovery and a clearer listing, I can look at what happens next in the funnel instead of guessing about every stage at once.

The larger lesson this week is familiar. Building the product was not the end of the work. Marketing has its own systems, experiments, and skills, and I am only beginning to learn them.