What happens when real influencers hand you a brief and say, “Build the app my audience actually needs“? Shipyard: Creator Contest set out to answer that question. In just four weeks, more than 900 builders competed to design, launch, and monetize an MVP for seven creators ready for long-term app partnerships. Now, we’re proud to introduce the seven winners.
Eitan Bernath
In Eitan Bernath’s category, the task was to help people actually cook what they’ve been meaning to make. Think of tools that turn inspiration into action: an app that can generate a grocery list from a recipe video/link, organize what you want to cook, and make it simple to get started.
Winning app: Preplo – turning cooking videos into actionable recipes
Preplo turns cooking inspiration into something you can actually make. Drop in a YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link and it instantly generates a structured recipe with quantities, step-by-step instructions (with timestamps), estimated costs, and nutrition info. It makes the jump from “I saved this” to “it’s on the table” much easier.
You can also tweak recipes on the fly — make it spicier, vegan, or low-carb, and everything updates accordingly. Built with Expo React Native and a Next.js backend, Preplo also caches processed videos so the same clip is never analyzed twice.
Gabby Beckford
In Gabby Beckford’s brief the goal was to build an upbeat, motivating app that turns goals into daily micro-actions, with challenges, streaks/wins, tracking, and gamified moments that make progress feel fun. Designed for ambitious women who want to embark on dream trips and life upgrades, but often get held back by the mundane day-to-day, or stuck between inspiration and action.
Winning app: Bloom – turning big dreams into daily wins
Bloom is a gamified personal growth app for women who need help taking the steps to turn dreams into daily life. Instead of another to-do list, Bloom connects goals, money confidence, mindset, and travel into one motivating system.
At the center is the Digital Garden: daily habits fuel visible growth, so progress feels real. Users can set ‘Dreams’, play bite-sized financial mini-games, journal with AI guidance, and track travels on an interactive map. Built with Flutter and powered by Supabase and Mapbox, Bloom focuses on making self-development feel encouraging rather than overwhelming.
Quin Gable
Dating and making friends on the road is hard when you’re always moving. Digital nomad Quin Gable wanted a van-life app with nomadic dating, activity-based friend finding, and even a paid ‘builder help’ section for van projects. To keep the community protected, the app needed to be invite-only or verified access to ensure the app remained safe and connection was intentional.
Winning app: WanderBase – dating and community for life on the road
WanderBase is a dating and community app built specifically for van-lifers and nomads. Instead of endless swiping, users explore hand-illustrated, customizable van avatars that reflect your lifestyle and travel vibe; a playful twist that feels true to life on the road.
It’s invite-only, with route-based matching, mutual chat unlocks, and a help-finding forum for van projects. Built with React Native and Firebase, with server-side matching and strict security rules, WanderBase guarantees trust, and prioritizes safety and fun in equal measure.
Sam Beckman
Sam lives by reminders, but switching between Android and iOS means rebuilding his entire system from scratch. His brief was to build a beautiful, fully-functional reminders app on both iOS + Android. It needed custom snoozes from notifications, powerful recurring rules, and true sync, so dismissing once clears everywhere.
Winning app: Remy Reminders – cross-platform reminders, finally in sync
Remy solves a real frustration: switching between iOS and Android without rebuilding your reminder system from scratch. It delivers a polished reminders app regardless of your platform choice, offers simple but effective rule-making, built-in notification pauses, and more.
Behind the scenes is a custom offline-first sync engine and a notification system that talks directly to APNs and FCM to keep everything aligned. Built with React Native (Expo), and Convex, Remy focuses on making reminders reliable, no matter what device you’re using.
Simon from Better Creating
Simon’s audience loves productivity, great design, and building systems for self improvement. Coaching is a key part of this, so Simon wanted to make the growth and self-assurance that comes from coaching accessible. This meant creating a clean, minimal mobile app where users can browse, create, and share AI coaches, add personal context/values, and start chatting immediately.
Winning app: Editor – decide with clarity
Editor flips the typical coaching or AI chat experience on its head. Instead of encouraging endless conversation, it’s designed to help builders and creators reach decisions quickly and deliberately. Going beyond a coaching app, users choose structured thinking modes like prioritizing, reviewing ideas, or weighing trade-offs.
Each session is built to get you to a decision quickly, then end. Outcomes can be turned into decision briefs or roadmaps and exported to Notion. Built as a native SwiftUI app, Editor stays intentionally minimal and focused.
Rebecca Louise
Rebecca hears it constantly: mums are short on time, want financial independence, and need practical help. Her brief was to build an app that offers everyday money-saving guidance (shopping swaps, batch cooking, cost comparisons, home reno savings) plus an approachable path into investing basics, so users can grow what they have without overwhelm.
Winning app: Sunny Money – Financial confidence for busy mums
Sunny Money helps busy mums build financial confidence in just a few minutes a day. It combines everyday money-saving guidance with simple introductions to saving and investing.
Bite-sized lessons, practical calculators, daily challenges, and an AI assistant make financial progress feel manageable. Built with React Native and Expo, Sunny Money respects mums’ time while still delivering real, useful tools.
Josh from VisualFaktory
Investors juggle stocks, gold, funds, fixed income, real estate, and more across multiple platforms. It’s messy to track and hard to understand at a glance. Josh wanted a single app where users can log everything, get real-time price updates where possible, set amortization/reminder alerts for non-listed products, and unlock premium risk + diversification analysis (like country/sector exposure).
Winning app: Folio – see your entire portfolio at a glance
Folio brings scattered investments into one clean iOS dashboard. Stocks, ETFs, crypto, property, savings — everything in one place so you can see your full net worth and understand your exposure on one screen.
It includes live pricing, performance breakdowns, widgets, alerts, and an AI assistant that understands your actual holdings and can help rebalance or adjust positions. Built with React Native and Supabase, Folio keeps portfolio tracking straightforward and actionable.
That’s a wrap
Across seven very different briefs, the winning apps had something in common: focus.
They didn’t try to do everything. They picked a specific audience, a clear problem, and built around it. The van-life app prioritized trust and safety. The reminders app obsessed over cross-platform sync. The finance apps respected their users’ time. The AI coach constrained itself on simplicity. Each team made deliberate trade-offs instead of chasing features.
While this is the end, we hope all of you continue building your apps, and most importantly, work on getting them out for people to download.
How did you find Shipyard? Did you have fun? Were there things you wish we had done differently?
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Let us know on Twitter or LinkedIn, and keep an eye out for a survey we’ll be sending to all participants to gather your feedback.