For a long time, I treated growth and marketing as the same thing. More channels. More distribution. More content, ads, posts, experiments. When growth stalled, my instinct was always to look outward. What I eventually learned was uncomfortable: If a product doesn’t grow by itself, marketing only makes the failure louder. Early growth problems rarely come from traffic In early-stage products, traffic is almost never the real bottleneck. What usually breaks growth happens much earlier:

When I first added monetization to my product, I treated it as a pricing problem. Monthly or yearly? $4.99 or $9.99? A clean paywall, a polished Pro page, and a subscribe button. Everything worked exactly as designed — except the revenue. Users were active. Engagement was fine. But conversion was consistently low. Nothing was “broken,” yet something was clearly wrong. It took me a while to realize the mistake: I didn’t have a monetization problem. I had a product decision problem.

Starting May 1, 2024, Apple began enforcing new App Store review requirements related to Privacy Manifests. As a result, many apps started receiving the following review warning or error during submission: ITMS-91053: Missing API declaration This issue often appears even when no recent code changes were made, which can be confusing at first. This article explains why this happens and how to fix it correctly. What ITMS-91053 Means The error indicates that your app references one or more Required Reason APIs, but does not include the required usage declaration in its privacy manifest.