Thrilled to share that I won @RevenueCat's #Shipyard2026 hackathon with my app Sunny Money, a financial guide for busy moms. A year ago, I built my first app and fell in love with creating beautiful app experiences. Today, I'm a hackathon winner. So thankful for this opportunity.
๐ข Shipyard 2026 winners are here.
900+ builders.
7 real creators.
4 weeks to design, ship, and monetize an MVP.
The brief?
โBuild the app my audience actually needs.โ
Here are the winners:
what i love about twitter is seeing folks half my age absolutely crush it in terms of marketing + MRR. it's incredibly inspiring and i love the hustle of the younger generation - i feel like i learn something new every single day.
everyone wants a cracked UGC creator for their app
@AlbertoAIcode just uses TikTok slideshows
no talking head
no polished videos
no insane editing
just fast testing until one format hits
he broke down the whole playbook:
00:00 intro
01:20 how it started
02:58 why slideshows
04:10 how to know if a video can go viral
05:23 how to avoid looking like an ad
07:24 scaling to other countries
11:26 music & hashtags
12:30 pricing
14:13 #1 tip for app builders
i need to understand how founders who work on 1 product don't get burnt out on thinking about that same product all day, everyday. like my mind literally struggles so much when i'm working on just 1 product endlessly.
@PKodmad these are pretty good. tbh the hidden plastics thing is so top of mind for me, not only for my clothes but for my kid's. love the hooks!
(also p.s. random, i noticed the phone in her hand and it is EXACTLY like my husbands phone, omg AI image gen is so good these days)
@KCodes7777 you might say its not "revolutionary tech" but have you tried Huckleberry's SweetSpot? I did not have a good sleeper and it was the only app in the market to predict his nap timings down to the minute. saved us sooo many overtired naps. and this was before the age of AI!
@PKodmad@KCodes7777 the other day i was thinking about how solid starts had to create all their content from scratch (since it launched a few years back). no AI generated photos or text. all real photos of food. really hard to compete with the trust + brand name that the founder created.
@PKodmad i'm definitely going after facebook and whatsapp groups (as well as my kiddo's daycare group ๐) after my next app update. especially since i think my audience lives there!
@PKodmad omg congrats!!! oh and completely agree with postpartum messing with sleep. i wake up almost every night around 4am, even if my kid doesn't wake me up.
@tankots@WisprFlow it used to save words i manually corrected and not repeat the mistake again, but it doesnt do that anymore. that + the accuracy dropping made me question the way i speak and so i've stopped using the product as much.
@PKodmad it's strong text hooks that have worked for me so far. most of my winning content have hooks based off an innate anxiety my user has, which helps stop their scroll.
I also try to pack in lots of info in my slideshows so it drives up saves and increases reach!
some days i feel like i haven't done enough. posting this to remind myself that 2 months ago i had 0 posts, 0 views, no app.
it took me 2 months to get here, and honestly i think it could've been better if i wasn't an exhausted mom rotating through daycare sicknesses ๐คช
One month in and I've got another viral hit! App's still in review, so no view-to-download data yet (that's what i'm anxious about, since conversion is the real challenge)
But this month convinced me virality is about consistency + relentless hook iteration. Excited to launch ๐
@wickedguro Might not be the case for you but I personally felt this way when my kid was less than a year old because of postpartum depression. I know that ppd can happen to dads too!
For me it resolved with time and one big change of scenery (quit my job).
atp i've learnt enough about hooks to know that i can get at least 100K+ views on a new account with just slideshows.
what's on my future learning agenda:
1) how to increase my app download per view
2) how to make simple videos that can achieve same or better results
and this isn't even my best performing account. i have another tiktok account that is wasting away (not monetized).
i tried tt shop but it wasn't for me. i was new to app building at the time and never ended up building an app for that audience.