There are less than six days left to submit your final entry to Shipyard, and if you’re thinking you’re already too late, I have just one word for you: wrong.
Even if you haven’t started building yet, there’s still enough time to get an app to beta and ship it through TestFlight or Google Play’s testing tracks. Shipyard isn’t about perfection, it’s about shipping — and a focused MVP can absolutely be competitive at this stage. And if you already have one app ready to submit, this is your chance to multiply your odds by building and submitting another app for a different brief.
In this post, we’ll walk through a few of the creator briefs and explore concrete ideas for how you could realistically ship an app for each of them. The goal is to help you move from “maybe” to “shipped,” even if you’re starting late or considering a second (or third) submission.
Make use of the vibecoding tools included in the Shipping Container
Anthropic recently released a new version of their Claude Code Opus 4.6 model, and it’s already supported by the tools included in the Shipping Container. That means you’re not just reading about more powerful AI-assisted coding, you can actually use it right now, as part of Shipyard, without any extra setup.
With these tools, building an app is no longer about writing everything from scratch or spending weeks on boilerplate. You can scaffold features, iterate on UI, and explore ideas at a pace that simply wasn’t possible before. Shipyard is a perfect excuse to take these tools for a real-world test drive and see how far you can get in a single weekend with focused execution.
Briefs that you could target
Shipyard offers seven different creator briefs for you to choose from, and you’re allowed to submit one app for each brief. That gives you a lot of flexibility — but it also comes with a few important constraints. You can’t submit multiple apps to the same brief, and you can’t submit a single app to multiple briefs. Each submission needs to clearly map to one brief, so it’s worth being deliberate about which problems you decide to tackle.
With just about a week left to build, it’s easy to assume that the window has already closed — but that’s not the case. To show what’s still possible, we’ve picked a few very different briefs and explored how you might realistically approach each of them in a short time frame. The goal isn’t to overwhelm you with ideas, but to help you see how a focused MVP can still be competitive.
Whether you’re only now jumping into Shipyard, or you already have one app submitted and are considering building a second — or even a third — these examples should give you a clearer sense of how to scope your work, pick the right brief, and maximize your chances of shipping something meaningful before the deadline.
“Investment tracker for all assets” — Josh from VisualFaktory
Investors juggle stocks, gold, funds, fixed income, real estate, and more across multiple platforms — messy to track and hard to understand at a glance. Josh wants 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).
This brief can seem intimidating at first. Supporting many different asset types sounds complex, but it’s exactly the kind of problem modern LLMs excel at: turning messy, unstructured information into clean, usable data.
A strong approach is to lean on the APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google and build an app that accepts almost any input — spreadsheets, screenshots, PDFs, or dictated descriptions — and converts them into structured assets your app can work with. The key is designing prompts that normalize the data and then visualizing it clearly. You can also use AI to analyze the portfolio and generate insights, pulling in real-time finance data when needed.
On the business side, this works naturally with usage based pricing. Using RevenueCat’s virtual currencies, you could offer AI-assisted imports and advanced risk analysis as credit based features, tying monetization directly to value delivered.
“Powerful reminders with cross-device sync.” – Sam Beckman
Sam lives by reminders, but switching between Android and iOS means rebuilding his entire system from scratch. He wants a beautiful, fully functional reminders app on both iOS + Android* with custom snoozes from notifications, powerful recurring rules, and true sync so dismissing once clears everywhere.
*For the purpose of the hackathon, you only need to build an MVP for iOS or Android
This brief is fundamentally about cross-platform thinking. Frameworks like Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, and React Native are a natural fit here — and if you’re building with React Native, you’re in especially good shape. Tools like Rork, Blink, Fastshot, Vibecode, and Replit make it surprisingly easy to scaffold and ship polished React Native apps quickly.
The app itself is once again the easy part. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — lies in reminders and notifications. Doing this well requires reliable sync and state management across devices, which usually means running your own backend. Instead of building everything from scratch, you can lean on tools like Firebase or Supabase to get a real-time database, auth, and sync set up quickly, without spending your limited hackathon time on infrastructure. Supabase especially, has a really good MCP, which you can make use by telling your AI agent to set up everything there
With a focused MVP, even a single-platform reminder app with rock-solid notifications and sync can stand out. Especially if it’s beautifully designed and clearly solves a problem Sam’s audience deeply cares about.
“Social app for van-lifers on the road” — Quin Gable
Dating and making friends on the road is hard when you’re always moving—and van life is a tight, protective community. Quin wants a van-life app with nomadic dating, activity-based friend finding, and even a paid ‘builder help’ section for van projects, with invite-only or verified access to keep it safe and intentional.
This brief gives you a chance to flex skills you don’t often get to use: building a social network from scratch. The surface level requirements are fairly simple, but making this work will still require a backend for accounts, messaging, and locationaware discovery. For tooling and infrastructure, it’s worth revisiting the previous brief for suggestions on how to get this set up quickly.
Where this brief really stands or falls is differentiation. To stand out, you need a clear hook that immediately resonates with van-lifers. One approach could be building a kind of mobile friendship book, where you collect connections as you travel from place to place. Layer in location based discovery and messaging, and you already have a well scoped app that feels built for this community.
Wrap up
Hopefully this post sparked a few ideas, whether that means submitting your very first app to Shipyard, or doubling down with a second one. If you’re still feeling stuck on what to build, how to scope it, or how to turn your work into a compelling story, I’d recommend checking out another post I wrote for exactly that situation, modestly titled How to win Shipyard.
With only a few days left before Devpost submissions close, it’s also worth revisiting the mechanics of a strong submission. I’ve covered that in a separate post,How to submit your app for Shipyard, where I break down what you actually need: a working app, a clear description, and a short three minute video showcasing what you built. That video matters more than most people expect, so make sure you spend some time getting it right.
Now get hacking.