Farcaster and the Base app are great distribution channels for onchain apps. But simply building an app isn’t enough. You’re unlikely to get users without intentional promotion.

Promotion can be tough, and there’s no silver bullet but there are approaches that work.

In this guide, I’m sharing everything I’ve tried and learned while promoting my mini apps. It walks you through how to start promoting your app and how to get your first users.

Experimentation is key. Every app is different, and every user base behaves differently, so you’ll need to test a lot and double down on what works best for your app.

Here’s my promotional playbook.

Promotion starts before you begin building your app. First, you need to gather people who are genuinely interested in your idea.

How do you do that? By launching your mini app in waitlist mode. In this mode, your app does just one thing: it lets users add the mini app to their collection and enable notifications.

This approach is beneficial on multiple levels.

First, it helps you validate interest early. You can see how many people open the app and how many actually add it—clear signals of demand and early validation for your idea.

Second, once your app is ready, you can notify these users immediately. Instead of starting from zero, you already have an engaged audience you can reach out to on day one.

Beyond early access, you should also consider rewarding users who join your waitlist with:

• Unique badges

• In-app items

• Unique roles

• Discounts

• Access to restricted features

• Early access

Everyone says you should share content on social media—but it’s often hard to figure out what to talk about. I struggled with this a lot too.

Sharing your builder journey turns out to be the best kind of content. It’s authentic, naturally promotes your mini app, and helps you build a follower base you can leverage for both current and future projects.

Once your waitlist mini app is live, start building—and start sharing your journey alongside it.

So what kind of content should you share?

• Share ideas

• Struggles building the app

• Development progress

• Setbacks

• Discuss issues publicly

• Demo videos

• Tutorials

• App screenshots

Otherwise, getting your first users will be very hard and they won’t stick around.

Promotion starts before you begin building your app, and the app itself plays a key role in that process. Promoting a bad app that no one wants is like pushing a ball uphill. Promoting an app people genuinely want is more like guiding a ball downhill.

Start by deeply understanding the needs and pain points your app solves. Then align incentives such as prizes, status, or perks that naturally encourage people to use it.

When you get this right, earning recasts, clicks, and app opens becomes significantly easier.

Your app should be designed to maximize shareable moments.

Shareable moments are achievements or milestones in your app where you prompt users to share their progress with friends. Increased sharing helps your app grow organically: the more your app appears in social feeds, the more new people discover it, join, and are likely to do the same.

This creates a powerful growth flywheel and building this flywheel is extremely important for long-term growth.

So what exactly are these shareable moments?

• Unlocked levels

• Unlocked badges

• Leaderboard ranking

• Challenges solved

• Rewards received

• NFT minted

• Swap made

• Prediction submitted

• Request resources/help

• Invite friends to play/take part

• Results

• Anything that benefits the user if they share it

To fully leverage these shareable moments, you need to add Share options at the right time. This should be a simple call to action—a single Share button.

When the button is clicked, your app should automatically generate a cast with a link pointing back to your mini app.

Auto-composed text significantly increases the likelihood of sharing, and including a direct link makes it effortless for new users to discover your app.

A great example of this in action is the Drawcast mini app, which is designed around shareable moments.

Your mini app’s share preview image needs to be eye-catching so it stands out in the feed and entices users to open your app.

In practice, there are two types of share images you should think about: static and dynamic.

Static images are defined in your app’s manifest file. They don’t change unless you manually update them and usually serve as your app’s generic share preview.

Dynamic images are generated on the fly when a user achieves something and shares it on Farcaster or in the Base app.

When users share these special moments, make sure you generate a custom preview image for each share. This way, their unique achievement is clearly and visually highlighted, making the post more compelling and more likely to be opened and reshared.

Farcaster has channels for almost every topic. Find the ones that best fit your mini app and share what you’re building there.

Don’t blast all channels at once. Space out your posts by a few days, be genuine, and tailor your message to each channel’s audience.

You can also leverage mini apps that offer amplification services. These let you pay users with large followings to recast your updates, helping you drive more eyeballs to your posts.

I recommend boosting your app announcement post first, then experimenting with boosting other product-related updates as well.

Some mini apps you can use include:

• Amps

• Beeper

• Surge

You can also use mini apps that incentivize users to perform specific actions in your app. Apps like Daily Active Users and Check-in are built for this purpose.

The long-term retention of these users can be questionable. Experiment in small ways and see how your app retains these users over time.

This can be a very impactful strategy. If you build something truly cool, you’re more likely to collaborate with other mini apps that already have an established user base.

Look for mini apps where a partnership could be mutually beneficial and explore ways to work together.

This is a group chat on Farcaster where people check out and provide feedback on mini apps. Share your app and ask for genuine feedback—ideally offering a small reward to compensate them for their time!

Fill out the amplification form to be considered for featuring your app in the Base app! While there’s no guarantee your app will be featured, it’s definitely worth a try: https://buildonbase.deform.cc/getstarted/

You can significantly improve your chances by meeting their requirements. Make sure to review them carefully in the form and optimize your app accordingly!

Improving your mini app’s ranking will increase its visibility on Farcaster and the Base app, leading to more app opens and new users.

The exact ranking factors, their weights, and details are not fully public—and they can change at any time.

However, based on observation and some speculation, here’s what likely matters most for your mini app’s position:

• App opens – How often users open your app (more is better).

• Session time – How long users spend in your app (longer is better).

• Number of transactions – How many onchain transactions your app generates (more is better).

• Total transaction volume – The total value of transactions in your app.

• App adds – How many users add your app to their collection (often correlated with app opens).

• Number of unique users making transactions – The more unique users interacting, the better.

• Volume per transaction – Higher value per transaction can positively influence ranking.

When building your app, think about ways to encourage users to:

• Open your app daily – Make it habitual and engaging.

• Spend more time in your app – Provide content or interactions that keep them engaged.

• Perform key onchain actions – Guide users toward meaningful transactions.

• Generate high-volume transactions – Encourage transactions of higher value when possible.

This post focused on user acquisition, but long-term success depends on sustainable growth, which comes from retaining your users. If retention is low, even the best app will struggle to survive.

Growing a mini app on Farcaster and the Base app requires more than just building it you need to actively promote it and create shareable, engaging experiences.

Start promotion early with a waitlist, share your builder journey, and design your app to maximize shareable moments. Leverage channels, collaborations, and amplification tools to reach new users, and optimize your app for ranking factors.

Ultimately, sustainable growth comes from retaining users, so focus on building habits and meaningful interactions that keep users coming back.

Last updated: 16 January 2026

Farcaster and the Base app are great distribution channels for onchain apps. But simply building an app isn’t enough. You’re unlikely to get users without intentional promotion.

Promotion can be tough, and there’s no silver bullet but there are approaches that work.

In this guide, I’m sharing everything I’ve tried and learned while promoting my mini apps. It walks you through how to start promoting your app and how to get your first users.

Experimentation is key. Every app is different, and every user base behaves differently, so you’ll need to test a lot and double down on what works best for your app.

Here’s my promotional playbook.

Promotion starts before you begin building your app. First, you need to gather people who are genuinely interested in your idea.

How do you do that? By launching your mini app in waitlist mode. In this mode, your app does just one thing: it lets users add the mini app to their collection and enable notifications.

This approach is beneficial on multiple levels.

First, it helps you validate interest early. You can see how many people open the app and how many actually add it—clear signals of demand and early validation for your idea.

Second, once your app is ready, you can notify these users immediately. Instead of starting from zero, you already have an engaged audience you can reach out to on day one.

Beyond early access, you should also consider rewarding users who join your waitlist with:

• Unique badges

• In-app items

• Unique roles

• Discounts

• Access to restricted features

• Early access

Everyone says you should share content on social media—but it’s often hard to figure out what to talk about. I struggled with this a lot too.

Sharing your builder journey turns out to be the best kind of content. It’s authentic, naturally promotes your mini app, and helps you build a follower base you can leverage for both current and future projects.

Once your waitlist mini app is live, start building—and start sharing your journey alongside it.

So what kind of content should you share?

• Share ideas

• Struggles building the app

• Development progress

• Setbacks

• Discuss issues publicly

• Demo videos

• Tutorials

• App screenshots

Otherwise, getting your first users will be very hard and they won’t stick around.

Promotion starts before you begin building your app, and the app itself plays a key role in that process. Promoting a bad app that no one wants is like pushing a ball uphill. Promoting an app people genuinely want is more like guiding a ball downhill.

Start by deeply understanding the needs and pain points your app solves. Then align incentives such as prizes, status, or perks that naturally encourage people to use it.

When you get this right, earning recasts, clicks, and app opens becomes significantly easier.

Your app should be designed to maximize shareable moments.

Shareable moments are achievements or milestones in your app where you prompt users to share their progress with friends. Increased sharing helps your app grow organically: the more your app appears in social feeds, the more new people discover it, join, and are likely to do the same.

This creates a powerful growth flywheel and building this flywheel is extremely important for long-term growth.

So what exactly are these shareable moments?

• Unlocked levels

• Unlocked badges

• Leaderboard ranking

• Challenges solved

• Rewards received

• NFT minted

• Swap made

• Prediction submitted

• Request resources/help

• Invite friends to play/take part

• Results

• Anything that benefits the user if they share it

To fully leverage these shareable moments, you need to add Share options at the right time. This should be a simple call to action—a single Share button.

When the button is clicked, your app should automatically generate a cast with a link pointing back to your mini app.

Auto-composed text significantly increases the likelihood of sharing, and including a direct link makes it effortless for new users to discover your app.

A great example of this in action is the Drawcast mini app, which is designed around shareable moments.

Your mini app’s share preview image needs to be eye-catching so it stands out in the feed and entices users to open your app.

In practice, there are two types of share images you should think about: static and dynamic.

Static images are defined in your app’s manifest file. They don’t change unless you manually update them and usually serve as your app’s generic share preview.

Dynamic images are generated on the fly when a user achieves something and shares it on Farcaster or in the Base app.

When users share these special moments, make sure you generate a custom preview image for each share. This way, their unique achievement is clearly and visually highlighted, making the post more compelling and more likely to be opened and reshared.

Farcaster has channels for almost every topic. Find the ones that best fit your mini app and share what you’re building there.

Don’t blast all channels at once. Space out your posts by a few days, be genuine, and tailor your message to each channel’s audience.

You can also leverage mini apps that offer amplification services. These let you pay users with large followings to recast your updates, helping you drive more eyeballs to your posts.

I recommend boosting your app announcement post first, then experimenting with boosting other product-related updates as well.

Some mini apps you can use include:

• Amps

• Beeper

• Surge

You can also use mini apps that incentivize users to perform specific actions in your app. Apps like Daily Active Users and Check-in are built for this purpose.

The long-term retention of these users can be questionable. Experiment in small ways and see how your app retains these users over time.

This can be a very impactful strategy. If you build something truly cool, you’re more likely to collaborate with other mini apps that already have an established user base.

Look for mini apps where a partnership could be mutually beneficial and explore ways to work together.

This is a group chat on Farcaster where people check out and provide feedback on mini apps. Share your app and ask for genuine feedback—ideally offering a small reward to compensate them for their time!

Fill out the amplification form to be considered for featuring your app in the Base app! While there’s no guarantee your app will be featured, it’s definitely worth a try: https://buildonbase.deform.cc/getstarted/

You can significantly improve your chances by meeting their requirements. Make sure to review them carefully in the form and optimize your app accordingly!

Improving your mini app’s ranking will increase its visibility on Farcaster and the Base app, leading to more app opens and new users.

The exact ranking factors, their weights, and details are not fully public—and they can change at any time.

However, based on observation and some speculation, here’s what likely matters most for your mini app’s position:

• App opens – How often users open your app (more is better).

• Session time – How long users spend in your app (longer is better).

• Number of transactions – How many onchain transactions your app generates (more is better).

• Total transaction volume – The total value of transactions in your app.

• App adds – How many users add your app to their collection (often correlated with app opens).

• Number of unique users making transactions – The more unique users interacting, the better.

• Volume per transaction – Higher value per transaction can positively influence ranking.

When building your app, think about ways to encourage users to:

• Open your app daily – Make it habitual and engaging.

• Spend more time in your app – Provide content or interactions that keep them engaged.

• Perform key onchain actions – Guide users toward meaningful transactions.

• Generate high-volume transactions – Encourage transactions of higher value when possible.

This post focused on user acquisition, but long-term success depends on sustainable growth, which comes from retaining your users. If retention is low, even the best app will struggle to survive.

Growing a mini app on Farcaster and the Base app requires more than just building it you need to actively promote it and create shareable, engaging experiences.

Start promotion early with a waitlist, share your builder journey, and design your app to maximize shareable moments. Leverage channels, collaborations, and amplification tools to reach new users, and optimize your app for ranking factors.

Ultimately, sustainable growth comes from retaining users, so focus on building habits and meaningful interactions that keep users coming back.

Last updated: 16 January 2026