Startup Tycoon: Company Sim

You have an idea, a laptop, and enough runway to last a few months.

Startup Tycoon is a management sim about the unglamorous part of building a software company: making payroll, shipping on time, and choosing who to hire when you cannot really afford any of them.

BUILD A TEAM THAT SHIPS Developers write code. QA kill bugs. Marketers bring users in. Every hire draws a salary whether they are working or not, and nobody is assigned automatically — an idle engineer costs you exactly as much as a busy one.

SHIP SOFTWARE, EARN USERS Turn lines of code into products and launch them. Revenue only starts after you ship, so every week before launch is pure burn. Add features to raise your ceiling, or start something bigger.

BUGS ARE NOT COSMETIC Ship with nobody testing and your product lands at one star. Ratings are a rolling verdict rather than a launch verdict, so a product you repair will recover — but leave it in the red too long and the store pulls it, taking its users and its reviews with it.

RESEARCH THE NEXT TIER Move developers onto R&D to unlock better products and permanent upgrades. Every week spent on research is a week not spent on the thing you are trying to ship. That is the whole decision.

GROW OR DIE Bigger offices seat more people. Bigger servers hold more users. Both bill you every month, and infrastructure takes a cut of everything you earn, so growth always costs you something.

HIRE WHAT YOU CAN ATTRACT A three-person company does not get to interview leads. Grow your revenue and better candidates start taking your call — each one asking a salary fixed at the moment you hire them.

SELL AND SCORE Cash out whenever you like. Your valuation is your score: cash on hand plus revenue, multiplied by how much your users actually liked what you built. Or run the balance negative for two months and lose the company instead.

Game Center achievements and a global leaderboard for your best exit.

The only ads are the ones you choose to watch. No energy timers, no waiting to play. The clock runs only while the app is open, so nothing happens to your company behind your back.