Why I Built Pupnik
I work from home, so getting outside and spending time with my dog is an important part of my day. I care about my dog's health and love the bonding time we get on walks. But walking the same trails day after day can become repetitive.
I built Pupnik to make dog walking more fun, motivating, and a little competitive. Every real walk becomes an adventure: level up your dog, uncover hidden treasures, build streaks, collect memories, and compete with friends. The goal is not to replace the walk; it is to give us another reason to look forward to it.
What It Does
Pupnik turns the dog walk people already take every day into a small outdoor game. Start a GPS-tracked walk, spot nearby collectibles, walk close enough to claim them, earn XP, and grow a dog from New Pup to Goodest Pup over 50 levels. The loop includes rare finds, daily streaks, neighborhood leaderboards, post-walk Pupshots and recaps, a Live Activity, a Home Screen widget, and optional Apple Health workout logging.
Location privacy is part of the design: precise home and real-time locations never appear in neighborhood social features.
Building in the Real World
Building a game that requires people to physically go outside has been much harder than I first imagined. Most apps can be tested from a desk. Pupnik requires real walks to discover bugs, tune a GPS-based map, and test how the experience behaves in new geographies.
The things that make Pupnik fun—hidden treasures, maps, real distance, and walking with friends—also make development and testing more difficult. I have had to test in motion, on actual routes, instead of only in a simulator or at home. That constraint has shaped the product: the first collectible needs to feel satisfying, the map needs to stay clear while walking, and the game needs to respect the real world around the player.
How Pupnik Makes Money
The core loop stays free: users can take unlimited walks, earn XP, level up their dog, hunt for treasures, and use the basic Pack and sharing experience.
Pupnik+ is for people who want more continuity and a deeper record of their dog's adventures. The free tier keeps a limited number of Pupshots open; later photo memories are saved safely as sealed entries, not deleted. Pupnik+ opens the full memory archive and adds On This Day, memory search, flashbacks and yearly recaps. It also includes stronger streak protection, more dogs per account, premium share-card styles, and expanded competitive/social tools.
RevenueCat powers the native iOS purchase flow, entitlement management, the subscription lifecycle, and an annual-price experiment. The annual Pupnik+ plan includes a 14-day App Store free trial so Shipaton judges can test premium features without a code, with a monthly alternative also available.
What I Built
Pupnik is a native SwiftUI iPhone app with a Supabase backend, Mapbox maps, RevenueCat subscriptions, PostHog analytics, Sentry crash monitoring, Apple Health integration, ActivityKit, and WidgetKit.
Public Release and Next Steps
Pupnik’s first public App Store release was August 25, 2026, within the Shipaton submission window. The app is publicly available, but I have not yet run a broad acquisition or marketing campaign.
This early release has focused on validating the real-world loop: starting a GPS-tracked walk, discovering a nearby treasure, progressing a dog, and testing the Pupnik+ purchase flow. The early non-test sample is deliberately small—two accounts, three completed walks, and one completed Pupnik+ purchase—so I am treating it as product validation, not a growth claim.
Next, I’m launching short-form social content built around real walks, treasure finds, and dog progression. I’ll measure installs, onboarding completion, first walks, first finds, return walks, and Pupnik+ conversion to decide what to improve and scale.
Shipaton Categories
Pupnik is being presented for Best Game (a GPS-based outdoor progression loop), RevenueCat Design (mascot-led interactions and real-world walking surfaces), HAMM (a layered free-to-Pupnik+ model), the RevenueCat Peace Prize (outdoor companionship with privacy-conscious social features), and Grand Prize (an honest early-release learning plan).
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