▸ Indie Hacker Tycoon — Press Kit

Description

Short: A satirical solo-founder career sim, played one month per tap: quit your job with $9,000, ship apps, and reach $5,000/month in recurring revenue before the money runs out.

Long: Indie Hacker Tycoon is a BitLife-style life sim about being a one-person startup. Each tap advances a month: you design apps (genre × audience × how you build it), work marketing channels with real dynamics — audience fit, trends, saturation — manage your health and happiness, and survive copycats, tech debt, and a rival founder with a personality. Skills don't just buff numbers: they reveal information, lifting the fog-of-war as your character learns to read the market. The tone is a loving roast of indie-hacker culture — build-in-public theater, hustle porn, "we're SO back" — written by someone living it.

The story

Indie Hacker Tycoon is made by a solo developer — an indie hacker building a game satirizing indie hackers, marketed by building it in public. The simulation is balance-tested by a headless bot harness that plays hundreds of seeded runs per release, with hard gates against dominant strategies and dead-end builds. Every event in the game's deck is written from the real culture: the $5M copycat seed round, the "build in public" thread that blows up, the rival who subtweets you.