How to write an app description
Every directory asks for the same three pieces of writing. Get them right once and every listing after the first one takes four minutes.
- Written by
- SpacerrApps
- Published
- Reading time
- 3 min read
Three pieces of writing do almost all the work of getting a product found: a tagline, a short description and a long one. Every directory, every launch platform and your own homepage want the same three, at roughly the same lengths.
Most founders write all three at midnight while filling in a form, and then paste that version everywhere for two years.
The tagline: 60 characters
The hardest one, and the one that decides whether anybody clicks. It has to say what the thing is and who it is for, and it has to do it without a single word of praise.
- Weak: "Productivity, reimagined."
- Weak: "The last email tool you will ever need."
- Strong: "Turns a recorded meeting into a summary and a task list."
- Strong: "Uptime monitoring you can self-host in one command."
The test: read it to somebody who has never seen the product. If their next sentence is a question about what it is, it has failed. If it is a question about how it works, it has worked.
Do not put your product's name in it. The name is already on the line above.
The short description: 150 to 300 characters
The tagline plus the reason to care. This one appears on listing cards and gets used as the meta description of your listing page, which is why the range is not arbitrary: under 150 the search result looks empty, over 300 it gets cut mid-sentence.
Structure that works every time:
[What it does]. [Who it is for]. [The one thing that makes it different]. [Price.]
Worked example:
Turns a recorded meeting into a summary and a task list. Built for teams already living in Slack and Linear, so tasks land where the work does rather than in another inbox. Free for five meetings a month.
Four sentences, 250 characters, and every noun in it is a phrase somebody types.
The long description: 500 to 1,500 characters
Three short paragraphs. What it does, who it is for, what is different about it. No headings, no bullet lists, no markdown, because half the forms strip formatting and what survives is a wall of asterisks.
Write it in plain sentences for one specific reason: a growing share of the people who find your listing never see it. An answer engine reads it and cites it in a reply to "what is the best tool for X". Those systems can use prose. They cannot use a grid of feature bullets. That is the whole argument in how to get your app cited by AI search.
Say what it does not do. "It does not write the reply for you" is the kind of sentence that makes both a reader and a model confident about the rest.
The words to delete on sight
| Delete | Because |
|---|---|
| Seamless, effortless, intuitive | Nobody searches for these |
| Revolutionary, game-changing | A claim with no content |
| Powerful, robust, cutting-edge | True of every product ever listed |
| Reimagined, redefined | Says nothing about what it is |
| AI-powered, on its own | Say what the AI does |
The rule behind all of them: if the sentence would still be true with your competitor's name in it, it is not describing your product.
Rewrite it for every listing
Keep the first sentence, rewrite the rest to match what that directory is for. Lead with the integrations on the integrations directory. Lead with the price on the comparison one. Lead with self-hosting on the developer one.
It costs about four minutes a listing, and it turns twenty copies of one paragraph into twenty pages a search engine can tell apart. That single habit is worth more than ten extra submissions. The rest of the field list is in the directory submission checklist.
Test it before you paste it anywhere
Three checks, in order:
- Read the tagline aloud to somebody outside your category.
- Search your short description's main phrase and see whether the results are what your product competes with. If they are not, you named the wrong category.
- Paste the long description into a chat assistant and ask it what the product does. If the answer is vague, so is the description.
Then use it
You now have the three pieces every form on the internet is going to ask for.
Submit your app with them, and it gets a directory page and a full write-up drafted from what you wrote, reviewed by a person before it goes live. The better those three fields are, the better the article is.