Building AsoGrove: Month 3 Recap

Three months in to building AsoGrove in public.

Build-in-public posts are most useful when they are specific. Numbers when I have them, observations when I do not, no invented metrics. Sunny's recap-at-recap-time discipline applies. Whatever I cannot verify by month 3 close, I rephrase.

Where AsoGrove stands at month 3

The shape of what I am building has not shifted since the founding announcement. Indie dev → first 100k users. Four tools, one subscription, one login. Keyword research, listing generation, screenshot studio, idea validation. Plus the launch kit.

What has shifted is the order I am shipping in. Month 1 was keyword research and listing fields. Month 2 was screenshots and the idea validator. Month 3 was the seven blog posts you are reading (and a quiet rebuild of the metadata generator engine that was not pulling its weight).

The waitlist is open. Cohort 1 founding seats are €49 a month for life. The seat count is what it is at the moment I am writing this. I will not invent it for the post.

What shipped

Concrete things that exist in production at month 3 close:

• Waitlist landing at asogrove.com with the 50-seat counter, welcome email sequence, and the form posting to a real Supabase row.
• Five doorway pages at asogrove.com/tools/* (keyword research, screenshot generator, idea validator, metadata generator, launch checklist).
• Eleven anchor blog posts. The one you are reading is one of them.
• The App Launch Checklist 2026 PDF, gated by waitlist signup at /tools/app-launch-checklist.
• The ASO Keyword Cheat Sheet PDF, in render queue for the week-4 drop.
• The keyword research engine, working end to end on iOS storefronts in five locales.
• The screenshot studio in private dogfood. Founding members will have it on day one.
• The metadata generator with the 12-signal pre-output audit.

What did not ship

Three things that were on the month-3 list and slipped:

The icon comparison tool. Three indie devs asked for it. I scoped it. I deferred it. Icons are the one part of the indie-launch workflow that I cannot template cleanly without the right comparison surface, and the right comparison surface is more work than month 3 had room for. Moved to the post-Cohort-1 roadmap.

The Play Store side of the keyword research tool. iOS is mostly the same shape across the 27 storefronts. Play Store ranks the long description, which means the keyword research workflow is structurally different. I had not budgeted enough engineering for the structural difference. Month 4 work.

The community Discord. Founding members will get one. The infrastructure is a quiet afternoon of setup. The afternoon has not happened yet because there is no signal that anyone needs the Discord before Cohort 1 opens. Moving it to right before the cohort opens, not before.

What I got wrong

Three honest misjudgements:

I underestimated the time the blog would take. Each post is 4 outputs (canonical, LinkedIn, X thread, hero spec). Plus the verification pass against the SERP for the primary keyword. Plus the stat-source audit. A post that looks like 90 minutes of writing is closer to four hours of substantive work end to end. I had budgeted ninety minutes. Cost: the icon tool slipped.

I overinvested in the metadata generator's first version. The first generator produced fluent text but did not audit against the 12 ranking signals before output. Indie devs ran it, got pretty descriptions, and ranked for nothing. The rebuild was the right move but the first version was a month I could have spent on the audit from the start. Cost: roughly three weeks.

I waited too long to start the outbound DMs. The DM-to-waitlist conversion rate is the highest-leverage acquisition channel I have, and I treated it as a follow-up to the LinkedIn long-form posts instead of running it in parallel from week one. Cost: a meaningful number of waitlist signups I could have collected earlier.

What is next

Month 4 priorities, in order:

1. Ship the Play Store side of the keyword research engine.
2. Open Cohort 1 to founding members at €49 a month for life. The exact week depends on the seat count at the moment I am writing this. The 50-seat cap closes the cohort regardless.
3. Run the talk-to-50 framework on every founding member who joins. 30 minutes per call, the same 14 questions, recorded with consent.
4. Synthesise the talk-to-50 results into the Cohort 2 roadmap. Cohort 2 opens at €99 a month for life.
5. Ship the icon comparison tool. Three indie devs asked for it. It is no longer optional.

What I am asking the audience

Three things, in order of how much they help:

If you are an indie dev launching in the next 90 days, claim a founding seat. The seat is €49 a month for life. The cohort closes at 50. asogrove.com/#waitlist.

If you have already launched an app, share the listing. I am running the keyword research and the listing audit on real apps in build-in-public. Reply with your App Store link and the niche, and I will run the audit on stream or in a thread. No charge. The composite reporting in the blog posts comes from these audits.

If you are reading this and have feedback on the blog, tell me. The blog is the slowest compounding channel I have. It is also the one I am most likely to get wrong. Reply to From App Idea to 100k Users with the post you wish I had written instead, and I will write that next.

Month 3 close. Month 4 starts the day I publish this.

50 founding seats at €49/mo for life are open while Cohort 1 is filling. Claim a founding seat 🌱.