Indie Hacker Tycoon

You quit your job with a few months of runway and one rule: ship apps, get users, hit $5,000 in monthly revenue before the money runs out.

Indie Hacker Tycoon is a satirical solo-founder career sim — pick a genre, design your app, then market it across X, TikTok, YouTube, cold email, and more. Every channel has its own trends, crowding, and a knack you build by using it. Marketing isn't a side menu here — it's the whole game.

THE LOOP • Design an app — genre, audience, and how you build it (Vibe-coded, SaaS, or a thin wrapper) • Market it — organic posts, UGC, paid bursts, or AI-generated content (cheap, fast, risky) • Look after yourself — health sets your energy, happiness makes your work land • Advance the month and watch the feed react — bankruptcies, viral hits, and brutal YouTube comments included

A LIVING MARKET The market shifts under you. Genres fall in and out of demand. A rival startup races you the whole way — clone your hits, undercut you, or get bought out entirely. Big decisions (VC money? A co-founder? Open source your core?) branch the run with a real cost attached.

PICK YOUR OWN ENDING Lifestyle business isn't the only way to win. Build something valuable and sell it. Go big and chase a real unicorn. Run a profitable portfolio of apps at once. Or skip revenue entirely and build a devoted cult following. Four founder identities — Operator, Craftsman, Growth Hacker, Influencer — each tilt the run differently.

FREE TO PLAY, NO PAY-TO-WIN The full Lifestyle career — every mechanic, every channel, every system — is free, forever. Pro Founder ($6.99, one-time) unlocks the other four ambitions, the other three founder identities, and removes ads. Energy is never sold, never timer-gated. We just think founders deserve a good story.