I mean I got that you have a great product and keep improving it and people will stay - but you have to get your users from somewhere.
Was it all just people who found the app organically in the app store? No PR or marketing of any kind?
We believe that search is a valid model for a utility app where people actually have a need/problem and can describe it in a search term. Multi language takes a big part to the success of a search strategy. We also translated the app store description to all possible languages, even if we don't have the app available in these languages. The user will then get the english version as default.
For games and social apps growth has to come from within the app as search wont work.
Android developers take note of this answer. Particularly the part about targeting search results in non-English languages!