# Growth skills Human Guide

## What This Is For
Growth skills for indie Apple developers — user acquisition, analytics interpretation, press/media outreach, community building, and indie business operations. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for growth marketing: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Growth skills agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for growth skills.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Growth skills guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- Asks about growing their app or user acquisition
- Wants to understand app metrics or analytics
- Asks about press/media outreach or getting reviews
- Wants to build a community around their app
- Asks about indie business operations (LLC, taxes, hiring)
- Mentions growth strategy, marketing, or user engagement
- Wants data-driven guidance on what to improve next
- Identify what growth stage the user is at:
- **Pre-launch**: store-growth-audit (seed the growth plan), press-media (prepare press kit), community-building (build anticipation)
- **Just launched**: analytics-interpretation (baseline metrics), press-media (launch outreach)
- **Growing**: store-signals (monthly loop), analytics-interpretation (optimize funnel), community-building (scale engagement)
- **Established**: store-growth-audit (quarterly re-audit), indie-business (formalize operations), analytics-interpretation (advanced cohorts)

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: When This Skill Activates, Available Skills, store-growth-audit/, store-signals/, analytics-interpretation/, press-media/, community-building/, indie-business/, How to Use, Supporting file: analytics-interpretation/metrics-reference.md.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- | D1/D7/D30 retention | Users must come back for ads to work |
- | D7 retention (free users) | Must retain long enough to convert |
- Month 1: Annual subscribers who don't renew
- Specific segment retains well, others don't
- **Important caveat:** Sunsetting is not failure. Most successful indie developers shipped several apps before finding the one that worked.
- Do not create content in real-time throughout the week. Instead:
- **Batch create**: Dedicate 2 hours on Sunday (or whenever) to write all posts for the week using your captured screenshots.
- **Do not automate engagement**: Auto-likes, auto-comments, and bot followers backfire.

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Growth skills human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills skill entry for `growth`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Growth Skills

Growth skills for indie Apple developers — from analytics interpretation to press outreach to community building. Covers the non-code aspects of building a sustainable app business.

## When This Skill Activates

Use this skill when the user:
- Asks about growing their app or user acquisition
- Wants to understand app metrics or analytics
- Asks about press/media outreach or getting reviews
- Wants to build a community around their app
- Asks about indie business operations (LLC, taxes, hiring)
- Mentions growth strategy, marketing, or user engagement
- Wants data-driven guidance on what to improve next

## Available Skills

### store-growth-audit/
Stage-by-stage audit of an app's App Store growth machinery against a 54-item P0–P9 playbook — every item scored from an ASC read, a codebase check, or an explicit question, then routed to the skill that fixes it. Read-only; works for live apps (audit) and pre-launch apps (growth plan).

### store-signals/
Close the post-launch loop — turn a live app's App Store signals (reviews, analytics, sales, crashes, listing conversion) into a metric-tagged backlog, and verify whether last cycle's changes moved the metric they promised to move.

### analytics-interpretation/
Interpret app metrics and make data-driven decisions. Covers DAU/MAU, retention curves, LTV/ARPU, App Store Connect analytics, funnel analysis (AARRR), cohort analysis, and decision trees for what to fix based on which metric is underperforming.

### press-media/
Get press coverage and media attention for your app. Covers press kit preparation, finding relevant journalists/bloggers/YouTubers, pitch timing and embargo strategy, indie developer story angles, and email templates for outreach.

### community-building/
Build and engage a user community around your app. Covers platform selection (Twitter/X, Mastodon, Reddit, Discord), building in public strategy, content calendars for solo developers, and converting community members into advocates.

### indie-business/
Business fundamentals for indie app developers. Covers business entity setup (LLC, S-Corp), Apple Small Business Program, tax basics for app revenue, revenue tracking, when to hire, and financial planning for indie sustainability.

## How to Use

1. Identify what growth stage the user is at:
   - **Pre-launch**: store-growth-audit (seed the growth plan), press-media (prepare press kit), community-building (build anticipation)
   - **Just launched**: analytics-interpretation (baseline metrics), press-media (launch outreach)
   - **Growing**: store-signals (monthly loop), analytics-interpretation (optimize funnel), community-building (scale engagement)
   - **Established**: store-growth-audit (quarterly re-audit), indie-business (formalize operations), analytics-interpretation (advanced cohorts)
2. Read the relevant sub-skill's SKILL.md for detailed workflow
3. Ask clarifying questions about the user's app, audience, and current metrics
4. Provide actionable guidance tailored to their specific situation

---

## Supporting file: analytics-interpretation/metrics-reference.md

# Metrics Reference

Definitions, formulas, and benchmarks for key app metrics. Use this as a lookup when interpreting user data in the analytics-interpretation skill.

## Metric Definitions and Formulas

### Engagement Metrics

**DAU (Daily Active Users)**
Users who open the app at least once in a calendar day.
```
DAU = count of unique users with at least one session on a given day
```

**MAU (Monthly Active Users)**
Users who open the app at least once in a 30-day rolling window.
```
MAU = count of unique users with at least one session in the last 30 days
```

**DAU/MAU Ratio (Stickiness)**
Percentage of monthly users who use the app on any given day. Higher = more habitual usage.
```
DAU/MAU = DAU / MAU × 100
```

**Session Length**
Average time spent per app session, from foreground to background.
```
Avg Session Length = total session time / total sessions