RevenueCat has a new hackathon, Shipyard: Creator Contest. Similarly to our previous hackathons, this one is also about building a real, monetized mobile app (MVP is enough, check the rules here). This time, however, your target audience are the community of real influencers — who will also be judging your submission!

This hackathon is a lot shorter than Shipaton, so it’s more important than ever that you focus on building the right thing, quickly. RevenueCat wants to support you in doing that, so we’ve written this hackers’ guide to building a winning app, based on four core lessons:

  1. Coming up with a great app idea
  2. Building your app fast
  3. Growing your user count
  4. Telling your story in the final submission

On top of these lessons, we’ve curated a bundle of tools, credits, and resources to help you build, launch, and monetize your app in the four weeks of Shipyard. Once registered, check your email (including your junk!) to receive your Shipping Container. 

Without wasting any more time, here’s how you win Shipyard.

Step 1: Come up with a great app idea

The first step into winning a hackathon is coming up with an idea for your app. Preferably this idea should be a really good one, as it will make building a great app significantly easier, but that is rarely that easy to do. So how do you come up with a great app idea?

First, start by watching the creator briefs, there’s seven of them, and they are all quite different. Be open, and don’t use come to this hackathon with an existing idea that you’ll then try to make fit one of the briefs. That rarely works, and to be frank, what you think is a great idea for an, usually isn’t. So take your time with the briefs, and pick the one that resonates the most. At this point your idea can be very simple, and it certainly does not have to be a groundbreaking one, we will distill it into a one next.

Talk to people

A common misconception is that people come up with great app ideas on their own. In reality people come up with average ideas on their own, and once they start talking with customers about the problem they have, it gets turned into a great idea. So take your preliminary idea, and go to the potential users with it. Watch the creator brief again, this time focusing on who is the target audience, and figure out where you could find someone that represents the target customer, then simply go talk to them.

Don’t just pitch your idea to the target customer, instead start with open ended questions. Build empathy to understand what the problem is that your customers are having, and how they feel it could be solved. Your goal is to understand your customers in such a way that you can instantly know what the real problem they are struggling with is, and what kind of solution they would fall in love with.

With all of this you should aim to get to a state where you feel that you have to build this specific app, because you’re the only one who really understands your customer, and therefore the only one who can get it right. For more pointers about getting to this state and coming up with a great app idea, take a look at our How to win Shipaton: coming up with an idea blog post.

Step 2: Build your app fast

Once you have your problem and idea nailed, it’s time to start building. The first lesson in building quickly is setting a timeline for yourself and sticking to it. Don’t wait for inspiration to start coding your app, that stuff is for amateurs. Winners just get to work and build.

You can approach your build timeline in multiple ways, but we have one that tends to work very well, and it only has three parts that all have a specific purpose:

1. Build your concept in 4 hours

In these four hours your focus is on proving that your concept works. The only person you need to convince that your app is great is you yourself. This is the part where you make something that barely works, but works nonetheless. There’s a bit of UI there already, but no polish, and there certainly shouldn’t be big infrastructure in your app at this point.

2. Build your MVP in 8 hours

Now take what you built in the first 4 hours, and start polishing it so that you could show it to a potential customer. Things don’t have to work at this point, they just have to feel like they work. Use mock data, make fake requests to services, be like the Wizard of Oz: it’s not magic but for users it feels like it is.

If you feel embarrassed to show your app, good. That means you’re going to your customer early enough with your idea and getting feedback that will set you on the right track.

3. Build your app in 24 hours

After you’ve shown your 8-hour making to customers, take what they have to say and incorporate it into your app. Drop things that users didn’t care about, add the things that enough people asked for. At this point your app will most likely still be embarrassing. You just need to get it to a stage where you could leave the customer alone with it and check back later how it worked. So launch the app if you can.

And keep launching and relaunching your app. Multiple times. Every day if it requires it. Add features, fix bugs, but never take more than day or two from getting those improvements in the hands of your customers. 

This process should highlight to you that great apps are built iteratively honing the product, not building it once and leaving it at that. So ship as often as you humanly can. We’ve collected more guidance on building quickly using this same method in this How to win Shipaton: building your app fast blog post.

Step 3: Grow your user count

After you’ve built your idea, comes the actual hard part: getting users. Shipyard does not require you to launch your app to app stores, but doing so doesn’t hurt either. After all, customers can only pay you if your app is available to them, and more customers means more revenue.

However there are other reasons for growing your user count than just converting them to customers. In the beginning especially, the more users you have the more feedback you get, and you might have already learned from the previous two lessons that gathering feedback and acting on it is the best way to build something that wins. 

For a more extensive lesson on growing your app, take a look at this blog post on Winning Shipaton by growing your app, but here’s a few key points to growing.

First make use of the Shipyard discord to recruit users to test your app. Get as many as you can, people will churn, meaning that they’ll stop using your app when it stops being useful to them. With your first version of the app, this will most likely happen with all of the users, that’s why it’s important to continue improving your app and launch it again and again. The most valuable learning you can get is talking to the users who stopped using your app, they know best what features your app is lacking, so try to get a hold of them.

Step 4: Tell your story

Last lesson to winning Shipyard has actually quite little to do with your app itself, and all to do with how you talk about your app. When you take a look at the submission guidelines for Shipyard, you’ll notice that two of the requirements besides the app are a short video and a written proposal. These are the two things the judges will be scrutinizing the hardest, so it’s important to communicate clearly what your app is about.

Clear messaging is however only half of the story. If you actually want to win, you need to tell a compelling story. This means framing the problem so that it elicits feelings from the people looking at the video, and in such a way that paints you and your app as the heroes of the story.

Now this all sounds rather complicated, but fear not, RevenueCat is here to help you with this as well. In our fourth guide How to win Shipaton: pitching your app guide, we go through a simple storytelling mechanic called the “Story circle”. Check out that article, apply it to your video and written submissions (and don’t do it on the last night before submissions close), and making both of them should not take you more than a few hours.

Make use of the Shipping Container

Last but certainly not least, we have partnered up with a group of companies to give you the best tools for building your app, a curated bundle called the Shipping Container. You can of course use any tools you want for building your app, but these freebies will help you a lot if you decide to make use of them.

Get inspired and brainstorm with AI

The Shipping Container includes tools for ideation and brainstorming. Study real-world UI and UX patterns in Mobbin, and jump over those design hurdles with ease. You can even outright steal the best onboarding and paywall patterns from popular apps, and use them in your app to improve your monetization and app experience.

Put Manus to work to do analysis in the ideation phase and growth phases, by brainstorming with it and using it to build beautiful looking landing pages. You can essentially use Manus as your team member in this hackathon, and you don’t even have to share the price money with them.

Build fast with vibecoding tools

The Shipping Container comes bundled with multiple different AI-assisted tools for building apps as well. You can build your app with Fastshot, Anything, Replit, and Rork, either using the mobile apps or the web based editors they have. All of these tools give you the power to build your idea into a real app, and most importantly all of them make it very fast to do that. 

All these tools also support RevenueCat, it’s enough to authenticate with your RevenueCat account and after that you can start telling the AI to add subscriptions, lifetime upgrades, entitlements, RevenueCat powered paywalls and more into your app with just prompts. If you’re feeling lost, take a look out for an in-depth video guide to doing all of this with Vibecode below.

Once your in-app purchases are working, you can explore other payment options. The Shipping Container comes bundled with Paddle as well, so you can add web-based payments alongside your in-app purchases, and experiment with additional monetization paths.

Time to set sail

Now get cracking and go build that winning app. Take a look at the linked and articles and most importantly: build something that people love, but something you love to work on. Don’t lose track of the end goal, building an app, not a concept. Get your app out to people, as soon as you get feedback I guarantee that your productivity will soar higher than in any other way.