The screenshots were done. The app was done. What was left was a form: a 30-character subtitle, a 4000-character description, and a keyword field capped at 100 characters that no user will ever actually see. That last one took longer than the other two combined.
Selling "does less" is harder than it sounds
Snugit's whole pitch is that it doesn't do much — no folders you're forced to set up, no AI summarizing things you didn't ask it to touch, no account wall before you've saved a single item. That's a strong pitch in a demo. On a listing page, next to a dozen competitors describing every feature they have, "does less, on purpose" reads like an app that's missing things until you say it exactly right. Most drafts of the description read like an apology. The one that shipped doesn't — it opens with the actual complaint the app solves (screenshots and links you saved for later, buried three apps deep and never seen again) before it says a single word about how Snugit works.
30 characters, four words if they're short
The subtitle sits right under the app name on every listing and search result, and Apple gives you 30 characters for it — roughly four words, fewer if any of them are long. Early attempts tried to summarize the entire app in that space and came out sounding like a slogan generator. What worked was picking the single behavior people actually search for — saving something fast and finding it again — and cutting everything else, including anything that sounded clever.
The field nobody sees, that decides who finds you
The keyword field is comma-separated, has no spaces to spare, and isn't shown anywhere on the App Store page — it exists purely to feed Apple's search index. A few of my first-draft keywords were guesses at words that sounded relevant; the ones that survived are words I could actually picture someone typing into search when they're annoyed at their own Notes app, which is a much narrower and more useful list.
Download Snugit — and see if the listing actually says what I meant it to.
Before this: the screenshots the listing is built around — what a screenshot actually takes.