The Meta API Review Trap and the Reality of Zero Traffic

It has been quite a while since my last blog post. I have been so deep in developer mode that keeping up with the blog fell by the wayside. I foolishly thought coding would be the hardest part, but as always, reality had other plans.

Right now, I am simultaneously navigating the Korean Payment Gateway (PG) review process and battling my most urgent blocker: Meta Instagram Business API Review.

It took about 20 days of waiting to finally hear back from Meta, only to receive a Rejection. The reviewer stated that the demo video (screencast) I provided did not clearly show the app’s integration flow, making it hard for them to understand and verify.

To fix this, I decided to revamp the UI and improve our onboarding guides so the user journey is crystal clear. Since I was already tweaking the UI, I ended up multitasking on some necessary PG-related UI compliance changes as well. Before I knew it, a whole week had flown by. Today, my goal is to put the finishing touches on the UI, record a fresh screencast, and resubmit it. Fingers crossed it passes this time.

Meanwhile, the service is currently in Open Beta. But the brutal reality of a new product is that organic traffic is virtually non-existent. The classic “build it and they will come” strategy is truly dead.

It looks like the time has come to actively find potential users and reach out to them one by one. As a solo developer who is far more comfortable talking to terminal prompts than actual people, this outbound marketing stage is going to be my biggest hurdle.

Sometimes I ask myself, “Why did I just jump into this headfirst?” 😅 But the die is cast, and the only way out is through. For now, I will focus on getting that Meta review resubmitted today.