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ShipHQ

A tycoon game where your real app business is the level: RevenueCat revenue, subscribers and trials become a living isometric startup office.

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Inspiration

Indie founders live inside dashboards. Numbers tick, charts wiggle, and the work of shipping an app never feels like progress you can see or show anyone. We wanted the opposite of another analytics tab: a place you walk into once a day, where your real business is the game world and every milestone is a physical thing on a wall.

What it does

ShipHQ turns your app business into a 2D isometric startup office.

  • Apps become desks. Connect RevenueCat and every app you pick gets a workstation with its real App Store icon and a health bar (growing, flat, losing subscribers).
  • Subscribers become people. Paid subscribers are the office population; trials walk in wearing a hat.
  • The Daily Brief is a scene, not a report. Overnight arrivals gather outside the door, the doors open, confetti bursts and the team claps them in. Churned subscribers walk out past hosts who wave (one pours water after them). MRR and revenue land with a sparkline only when the series actually moved.
  • Real milestones become trophies. 40+ achievements across revenue, subscribers, users, shipping and longevity, each a different object: a cup, a plaque, a neon sign, a play button for 100K users. There are no retroactive trophies: connecting at $5K MRR grants nothing; today is your baseline.
  • A tycoon economy on top. Desks produce Company Cash from real MRR (1 cash per $ of MRR per hour, capped at 8 hours). Spend it on station upgrades, furniture and rooms placed on a tile grid in Build Mode. Money buys comfort; progress earns prestige, and prestige is never for sale.
  • Daily loop. Streaks with a 09:00 local day boundary, daily jobs, streak freezes, a weekly summary and a Town leaderboard of the longest streaks.
  • Maya and the managers. Maya guides you through the office and, on paid plans, writes scheduled AI reports from your real metrics. Managers each bring one sourced note to a morning standup.
  • Honest numbers. A metric without a connected source is an em dash with a way to connect one. Nothing is invented for effect.

How we built it

  • Flutter (portrait, iOS) with one custom isometric renderer that draws every office in the product: home, Build Mode, the Daily Brief, onboarding reveal and a friend's HQ.
  • RevenueCat for data and monetization: the app reads MRR, subscribers, trials and the paywall/trial/churn charts through RevenueCat's API, and sells memberships through the RevenueCat SDK (Offerings with custom packages per plan and duration, one entitlement, and a webhook so purchases reach the backend).
  • Supabase (Postgres + Deno edge functions) for sync, OAuth connectors (RevenueCat, Google Analytics 4), the daily poll, the daily loop and the AI report pipeline.
  • A strict network rule: the app talks to the network exactly twice per session, one batched read when it opens and one batched write when it closes. A SyncGate throws on any request outside those windows, and widget tests assert that a full session produces exactly hq.open and hq.close.

Challenges we ran into

  • Turning noisy metrics into a scene without lying. Every arrival, departure and trophy has to come from a real event, so the brief is built entirely from the snapshot diff.
  • Our first App Store submission was rejected because the reviewer could not find the paywall. We made the path obvious (Profile > Expand studio, and Office > Hire open the same plans) and shipped 1.0.5 on September 29.
  • Getting isometric footprints, walkways and wall-mounted rooms to behave on four floor sizes (7x9 up to 14x20).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A 400+ test suite, including renders of every screen at 390x844 and a lifecycle test that proves the two-request rule through the real widget tree.
  • A Daily Brief that founders actually want to watch every morning.

What we learned

Constraints make better games. "No fabricated metrics" and "no retroactive trophies" forced us to design honest rewards, and they feel better than fake ones.

How ShipHQ makes money

ShipHQ is free to start and sells space: paying expands the office (more app desks, analytics rooms and seats for the AI managers), never XP, levels, rank or trophies.

  • Memberships: Mini ($4.99/mo or $29.99/yr), Growth ($9.99/mo or $59.99/yr, "Most popular": 3 AI managers on Claude Sonnet 5.5) and HQ ($19.99/mo or $119.99/yr: all five managers on Claude Opus 5.5). Annual is the default and about 50% off.
  • One paywall, shown in context: "Grow your HQ" opens when a founder asks for more room (a third app, hiring a manager, Profile > Expand studio), never on launch. It is built on a RevenueCat Offering whose metadata sets the default plan and period, and the same design is published as a RevenueCat Paywall.
  • Founder's Collection (1.0.6): three real-money-only decor packs - Simple ($2.99), Mid ($3.99), Premium ($9.99) - whose ten pieces arrive one per founder level; they cannot be earned or bought with in-game cash.
  • RevenueCat everywhere: the SDK runs purchases, restores and trial eligibility, webhooks keep our server's entitlements in sync, and founders' own RevenueCat numbers (Charts API, paywall and trial conversion, churn) are what their office and AI managers are made of.

What's next for ShipHQ

Google Play, more managers, and RevenueCat experiment results inside the office so founders can watch an A/B test play out on the floor.

For judges

ShipHQ is free for up to 2 apps with no account required (explore the sample office or continue as a guest). Every membership (Mini, Growth, HQ; monthly and annual) has a 1-month free trial for new subscribers from October 1 to October 15, 2026. The plans are at Profile > Expand studio, or Office > Hire.

ShipHQ 1.0.6 went to App Store review before this submission, with the Founder's Collection, the day-by-day "this week vs. the week before" charts, working Friends and the purchase fixes. If a feature is not in the version you install, please don't count it.

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Updates

posted an update —

Final standings, Product Hunt, Oct 2

  1. Gauth Unlimited Digital Canvas: 480
  2. Veltrix AI for E-commerce: 293
  3. Teachoo: 259
  4. Famulor: 217
  5. Eleven v4 (ElevenLabs): 168 points · 7 comments
  6. Mintlify Desktop: 167 points · 10 comments
  7. ShipHQ: 153 points · 19 comments
  8. Bambu Lab R1: 131 points · 7 comments

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posted an update —

Product Hunt launch day update

I held #5 for most of the day. Then in the last 4 hours, while I was asleep in Turkey, ElevenLabs and Mintlify (a $500M company backed by a16z) passed me. ShipHQ finished #7.

And honestly? I'm proud.

I built ShipHQ alone:

  • no team
  • no funding
  • no launch agency

Just me, a few small apps, and the idea that a new subscriber should feel like someone walking through your door.

Finishing right behind two of the biggest names in AI, with more comments than both of them combined, is more than I imagined when I hit launch.

And X showed up for me in a way I never expected. Every share, every comment, every DM. I read all of them. Thank you

Day one is over. The office is open. Back to building

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Submission history