Shipaton has a lot of prizes. Enough that it's easy to pick a headline category, get back to building, and forget to look at the rest. I'd understand if you haven't studied every row of the prize table.
To help you out, I went through the categories again, and collected seven that you should consider targeting during the remaining two weeks. All of these reward work that would make your app stronger anyway: finding a route to market, testing growth, launching to a new market, or getting clearer about your audience.
Some can fit an app you already have in progress, and there’s still time to pivot or even build a new app.
Launch a web-to-app funnel for the Funnel Vision Award
If your app is nearly done, the next question is awkward but important: how will anyone find it?
The Funnel Vision Award gives you a reason to answer that now (that plus the $15,000). To enter, launch a live web-to-app funnel with RevenueCat Funnels and use Stripe for checkout. Best thing: you most likely don’t need to release a new version of your app at all.
Keep the first version laser-focused. Pick one audience, one promise, and one offer. Send people to the funnel from a post or small ad campaign, then watch where they continue, pay, or drop off. The judges will look at payment volume, funnel design, and conversion. So don’t build a generic landing page that could belong to any app, but instead make the journey feel like the first useful part of your product.
Personally, I’d spent the least amount of time on the visuals and more time making the all the steps serve a purpose. The app that understands why someone clicked has a much better shot at converting them. If web acquisition is new to you, the Web-to-App Funnels Handbook covers pretty much everything.
Take an idea all the way to income with Replit
The Idea to Income Award offers $15,000 for first place. And it’s exactly what the name suggests: start with an idea, use Replit to build it, publish it, and prove that somebody will pay for it. You’ll need to build the mobile app with Replit, integrate RevenueCat using Replit Agent, and share at least three public posts from different points in the build.
To make the best use of your time, build for iOS, with that you have the biggest chance to get your app approved in time. The scope can be small (and should be). A specialist calculator, a training companion for one sport, or a practical tool for one profession can become a real product faster than an app trying to serve everyone.
Give your Android app a Galaxy-specific advantage
Already building for Android? Publishing on the Galaxy Store opens another route into Shipaton — and another market for customers to find you. Galaxy store optimization accounts for 20% of the score, and the store listing itself needs to be polished. A thing you can work on without having to release a new version of your app.
Should you target Samsung products by focusing on their unique selling points, that is also possible. Look at the hardware your app will run on. For example a foldable can turn a recipe app into ingredients on one side and instructions on the other. A planning app can keep the calendar and task details visible together. Small updates you can make to your app to make it more suited for Samsung devices.
You don’t need to use every Samsung-specific feature. Pick the one that makes sense for your app and make it feel intentional.
The prize is three weeks of featured placement across the Galaxy Store’s Apps and Discover tabs. There’s no cash prize here, but for an app that’s ready to convert and retain users, the distribution could bring even more money.
Run one honest growth experiment with Layers
You don’t need a huge audience to enter the Growth Loop Award. You need a clear idea of who the app is for, a reason they might care, and an experiment you can learn from. That makes this a good category for a newly launched app, and the winner takes $15,000.
Install the Layers SDK, choose one growth loop , and write down what you expect to happen. Then run it long enough to see a signal. If this sounds foreign to you, Layers has good resources on how to do this, and while going through those you also learn how to market your app, something you should do even if you didn’t target this prize category.
The result you get doesn’t have to be a hockey stick. The judges want to see that you treated growth as a loop: form a hypothesis, run the test, and then decide what comes next.
Make today’s movement decision easier for Simone Sharice’s audience
The Simone Sharice Influencer Award (with $20,000 for first place) asks for a personalized wellness companion covering movement, Pilates, recovery, and other day-to-day wellness needs. This does not mean that you need to build an endless workout library and ask users to figure it out. Better to build something personalized; a plan they can actually start.
To give you an example, on a low-energy day, that may be 10 minutes of recovery work. On another, it may be a focused Pilates session. The value is in making the choice feel manageable. So personalization matters, but so does restraint. The brief specifically rewards apps that avoid overload and make the next action obvious.
A strong first version could do three things well: understand today’s context, recommend a suitable session, and learn enough from the result to improve tomorrow’s recommendation.There are multiple Shipaton submissions targeting health and fitness, if yours is one, check if you could submit it for this award.
Build a nutrition app that doesn’t turn lunch into homework
Most nutrition apps start with numbers. Abbey’s Kitchen brief starts somewhere more human: help people make meals more satisfying without calorie counting or macro tracking.
Your app could let someone photograph lunch and ask what would make it more filling or enjoyable. It could let customers turn leftovers into a workable meal, or suggest useful additions based on what’s already in the kitchen. Something that is missing completely from current calorie and meal tracking apps.
You can build the core around one simple question: “What can I add?” Answer it well, in the moment when someone is hungry and short on ideas, and you’ve built something that is perfect for Abbey’s Kitchen’s massive audience.
Let new managers rehearse the conversation they’re avoiding
New managers are expected to give feedback, hold boundaries, and say no. These are often things you don’t get to practise beforehand. That’s the opening behind the Leadership Heather Influencer Award, which also offers $20,000 for first place.
What you could build is for example a rehearsal room, giving the user a realistic situation, letting them respond by voice or text, and then offer feedback they can use on the next attempt.
Start with a handful of conversations people genuinely dread:
- Giving direct feedback to a strong performer whose behaviour is negatively affecting the team
- Saying no to an unrealistic request from a stakeholder
- Setting a boundary with a direct report
Build it so that users of the app can get personalized feedback. Did the manager state the issue clearly? Did they bury the message? Did they set a boundary? Did they leave room for the other person to respond? All of these are very easy to codify in such a way that LLM’s can answer and give personalized feedback.
A quick note on the Influencer Awards
These categories give you an audience and a problem to solve. They don’t give you permission to use someone else’s identity. Name the Influencer Award in your submission and explain how the app serves that audience. But don’t use the influencer’s name, image, likeness, voice, branding, or logos in the product or marketing without written consent.
You can enter each project in only one Influencer Award. The same project can also compete in other non-Influencer categories when it meets their requirements.
Make things easy for the judges
Each award has its own requirements: a live funnel URL, Stripe Project ID, Replit preview URL, public build posts, Galaxy Store listing, verified Layers installation, or an explanation of how you served the chosen audience. It’s crucial that you don’t make judges hunt for that information in your submission.
The rest of your submission matters too. You’ll need a live store listing, a demo video under two minutes, an app icon, the required screenshot, and a free trial or promo code that unlocks paid features for judging. Our Shipaton submission guide walks through each of these requirements so take a look at it before you submit.
Shipaton closes on September 30, 2026 at 11:45pm PDT. Store review can take days, so ship the smallest valuable version now and improve it while the review is ongoing. For guidance on submitting your app for review, see our Late submitter’s guide.