Shipaton IRL handbook
How to host your own Shipaton IRL event.
Use this if you are pulling together a local meetup, mini hackathon, coworking day, demo night, or campus event for people who want to build apps.
Start here
What is Shipaton IRL?
Shipaton IRL means hosting your own Shipaton-themed event with support from RevenueCat. Shipaton happens online and mostly asynchronously, but a lot of builders still do better when they can sit in a room, meet people, show what they are making, and leave with a reason to keep going.
Maybe you have never organized an event before. Maybe you just know there are app builders in your city, school, or community who should probably meet each other. That's enough of a starting point.
What you need is a room that doesn't feel intimidating and a few people who want to build things. Everything else can stay pretty simple.
Why host Shipaton IRL
Because local builders need excuses to meet.
A lot of app builders are weirdly alone for how online this industry is. They read the same launch posts, fight the same SDK issues, and think about the same pricing questions, but they may not know anyone nearby doing the same thing.
Hosting Shipaton IRL gives them a simple excuse to show up. They don't have to already be “in the scene.” They don't need a finished app. They just need a reason to walk into the room and say what they are working on.
People ship more when they know someone will ask about it later.
A local event gives builders a tiny bit of pressure in a good way. It turns “I should work on this” into “I told three people I would show this next week.”
It helps the quiet builders find each other.
Every city has people building apps alone at night, between classes, or around a day job. Shipaton IRL gives them a reason to leave the group chat and meet actual collaborators.
It makes Shipaton feel less like a website and more like a community.
Online hackathons are great, but they can feel abstract. A room with demos, snacks, half-finished prototypes, and people swapping App Store stories makes the whole thing real.
It also gives you a low-risk way to start something in your city or campus. You are not promising a conference. You are just creating one useful night for people who are trying to ship.
RevenueCat support
How RevenueCat helps you host.
If your event is approved, we will help get the word out and send you the stuff that makes the event feel like part of Shipaton instead of just another calendar invite.
That matters more than it sounds. Getting people to RSVP is usually the part organizers dread most, and showing up with branded materials makes a small meetup feel like it belongs to something bigger.
Meetup-in-a-box
Promotion to Shipaton participants
Stickers and T-shirts
Swag to hand out as prizes
Food vouchers in eligible locations
Slides and branding materials
Campus promotion templates
Student organizers can use the same resources for a hackathon night, club workshop, or campus sprint. It doesn't need to feel official or stiff. It just needs to get classmates building.
If you are organizing on campus, think small and repeatable. A Wednesday evening workshop that gets ten people building can be more useful than a huge weekend event that burns everyone out.
Event formats
What kind of event should you run?
Need a starting point? These formats have worked in different cities and communities. Copy one, combine two if it makes sense, or make up your own. Just don't try to make one night be a conference, hackathon, mixer, demo day, and launch party at the same time.
The easiest way to choose is to ask what your local builders are missing. If people need motivation, run a coworking day. If they need feedback, run a showcase. If they need confidence to launch, run a clinic or demo day.
01
Indie builder speaker night
Invite a few local founders, developers, designers, or creators to talk about what it actually took to ship something. The best talks are usually the honest ones: weird bugs, bad launches, pricing mistakes, tiny wins, and things they wish they knew earlier.
02
Project-in-progress showcase
Ask people to show what they are building right now. It doesn't need to be finished. It barely needs to work. Half-built projects tend to get better feedback than polished demos anyway.
03
Demo day
Once submissions close, get everyone back in the room and let them show what made it out the door. Some apps will look ready for the App Store. Some will be held together with hope and a launch screen. Both count.
04
Find-a-teammate event
Give people a simple way to say who they are, what they can do, and what they are looking for. Some will have an idea. Some will just want to join something. That's the whole point.
05
Mini hackathon
Don't try to recreate the whole Shipaton in one afternoon. Use the time to get people started: validate an idea, build the first screen, set up RevenueCat, make a landing page, or find beta testers.
06
Coworking day
Book a space, invite builders, and let people work. A quick intro round, lunch break, or end-of-day demo is enough structure. The work is the event.
07
Ship & Tell
Ask attendees to share something interesting they built, learned, launched, broke, fixed, or discovered recently. It doesn't have to be directly related to their Shipaton project.
08
Launch clinic
Bring in people who have launched before and let attendees put their messy launch questions on the table: pricing, ASO, onboarding, paywalls, launch posts, beta testers, all of it.
09
Feedback night
Put apps, onboarding flows, paywalls, ideas, or half-working prototypes in front of real people. Keep the tone useful, but don't make it toothless. Builders came for actual feedback.
10
Launch party
Not every event needs a workshop agenda. Sometimes the right move is pizza, demos, photos, swag, and a room full of people saying: you shipped, that rules.
Run of show
How to run your event.
If you have never organized an event before, here is the good news: most attendees have no idea what happened behind the scenes.
They don't know if the agenda changed three times the night before. They don't know if a speaker cancelled two days ago. They know whether someone said hello, whether the room made sense, and whether they were glad they came.
Your job is to make the first few minutes easy. Put the sign where people can see it. Say hi before they have to hover awkwardly by the door. Introduce the person building a budgeting app to the person who just shipped a finance app. Small things like that do more than a perfect agenda.
Step 1 · Before the event
Pick one event, not five.
Start by deciding what kind of night this is. A demo day, coworking session, speaker night, mini hackathon, and teammate mixer all ask different things from the room. Pick one main thing and let the rest stay optional.
- Secure a venue: coworking space, classroom, office, startup hub, community center, or roomy cafe.
- Publish the event and let RevenueCat help spread the word.
- Send reminders with directions, timing, and what attendees should expect.
- Make it easy for newcomers to feel comfortable walking into the room.
Step 2 · During the event
Work the room before the schedule.
Your first job isn't to protect the agenda. It's to greet people, introduce attendees to one another, and get the first few conversations going. Builders usually have plenty to talk about once someone makes the first move.
- Keep speaker introductions short and get into the content quickly.
- For showcases and demo days, make the first volunteer feel easy to follow.
- For coworking or mini hackathons, let silence be okay. People came to build.
- Take photos, capture demos, and share small updates online.
Step 3 · Ending the event
Do not let it just trail off.
A common organizer mistake is letting the night fade out while people check Slack and pack bags. Take two minutes to close the loop and make the event feel like it happened.
- Thank attendees for showing up.
- Recognize anyone who spoke, demoed, mentored, or helped organize.
- Remind people how to stay connected and what Shipaton milestones are coming next.
- Encourage attendees to continue building.
Swag
Giving away swag.
You have stickers. You have T-shirts. You have swag. How do you give it away?
The answer is: however you want. Swag is there to make the event more fun and reward people for joining in. There is no official Shipaton-approved distribution algorithm.
The only real rule is to avoid making swag feel like a secret prize table. Tell people how they can win something. Make it visible. Give the first shirt to someone who demos early if you need to loosen up the room.
- Reward people who demo, give feedback, introduce themselves, or help the room participate.
- Let attendees vote for favorite projects with a show of hands, a quick poll, or a QR code form.
- Use Spin-a-ton when you want a custom wheel of names for raffles, trivia winners, or quick random prize picks.
- Run trivia that starts conversations: when was Apple founded, etc, you get the idea.
A good Shipaton event should get people excited to ship their app. Focus on that.