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:
- Coming up with a great app idea
- Building your app fast
- Growing your user count
- 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.