Heyo.

I'm Ger, the guy behind this - saw a huge spike in traffic and thought it very much looked like a HN frontage incident.

I built the app in just over three months; alternating between development and marketing a day at a time.

The game is still at an early stage (read: quite buggy) but I'm working on it everyday to improve stability. Nevertheless, I've a ton of nice feedback from people who love the game.

I'll be developing the app over the next few months so expect to see plenty new features.

Happy to answer any questions you guys wanna throw out there.

I'm angry with you. Why?

Your app quickly became my favorite game, played it like crazy. It consumed my time so much that I falled behind schedule for a few of my personal projects. Everything was great. I was making virtual millions by losing possible billable hours; it was a true addiction.

Then, it crashed! CRASHED. I restarted it, deleted and reinstalled it, nothing worked. Your update didn't work either. Now I feel lost. Is there a Hipster CEO recovery center you guys know?

My boring jokes aside, seriously, it stopped working properly after it crashed. A assign a job to a worker, it stucks at 0%. Restarting the app, it becomes something like %14. And stays like that. Only way to make progress is to restart it again. And again. I tried tweaking the gamespeed, that's not it. And I rather not reset my device to get an app working. I'm using iPhone 5 with latest iOS 7 update.

Any ideas?

Hey dude,

Thanks for buying the app! I think there's one or two validation fails that occur which are causing the crashes. I've put several fixes in to the upcoming build so fingers crossed that sorts you out.

If you want to get in touch, send me a mail: ger [at] hipsterCEO [dot] com

Where is the Android version? Too mainstream for you?

Everyone knows Hipsters are Apple-only :P

The Android version will be used by the engineers doing the actual work.

It's a one man show, my friend!

You know it.

Congrats Ger - looks like a lot of fun. I'll give it a spin when I can find some more time to procrastinate.

Have you noticed how Apple appears to butcher the resolution of the screenshots you upload there?

I saw the same thing. I created delicious .png shots in sketch and Apple turned them into shitty lossy jpegs that look hideous.

I even happen to have used the same Intro Inline typeface as you so this is a reproducible glitch. It's a shame because it reflects poorly on us as makers, as well as Apple. For a company whose entire model is based on elegance, I'm surprised they do it.

Wow. Didn't notice that until you pointed that out.

Yeah, it makes the shots look kinda crummy :(

Congrats on launching the game.

I had a company with a balance of 2bn, and accidentally managed to bankrupt it by transferring everything to my wallet. I should read numbers more carefully. However, the acquisition/investment offers I had gotten were still available when I started a new company, so I managed to sell it for something like 1.5bn before work had even begun on the product.

A few suggestions:

* Finding employees to give raises/bonuses to is tedious when you've got lots of employees. It would be nice to have a link to the employee from the email, or maybe even embed the "interact" button inside the email. (from level up, wage complaint emails)

* The conversion rate seems to be bugged. It always stays at 0% for me.

* It would be nice to see the effectiveness of the ad campaigns/social media campaigns you're running.

* The spending power/market size of a niche seems to only be visible after niche research is done.

* After cashing out the first company, there's not much challenge in getting the 2nd off the ground: 1) Do each of the tech categories yourself/hire the best employees and get over 90% rating. 2) Fire any tech workers, hire marketers to do a $99999 TV campaign, wait for it to accumulate site visitors. 3) Set yourself to do the sales 4) Launch the product and watch the sales skyrocket

I found the early game the most fun, but I imagine that's what you've spent the most time tuning so far.

Fun game, looking forward to future updates :)

Edit: Oh, and the leaderboard seems to be broken at the moment. Or is that just on my end?

This was super fun & funny to play, reminded me of lemonade stand. Thanks for making it!

Feedback:

- Spotify playlist "soundtrack" is an awesome idea.

- As the game progressed, the interface got super slow and unresponsive. (i.e. table views barely scrolled, etc.) Didn't crash, though.

- The "average" daily income right next to the current daily burn rate is confusing, and it looked like the math was running wrong. (Burn rate much higher than my average income, but my money in the bank keeps going up? Huh?)

- Want more content/challenge. ;)

- Might want to warn users that the name/company name they enter is going to be posted on a public leaderboard. I deliberately "ran out of money" by taking a $2B investment with $2B in the bank so I wouldn't be in the leaderboard top tier.

Hey dude,

Thanks for purchasing and your nice words!

I reckon there's a memory leak or two causing the unresponsiveness. Working on fixing it for the next version.

Will be adding more content as time goes by - I hope to do an update every 2 weeks so keep your eyes peeled.

Thanks for feedback, duly noted!

Ger, thanks for building a great and fun app! I've played it for a little bit and am definitely hooked. One would think that after a long day of working on a startup, the last thing I'd want to do is play a game about working on a startup, but I guess I'm masochistic like that... :)

Having a few buggy issues with sliders in the game being oversensitive and I wish there was a more intuitive back button in each path--otherwise, it's definitely difficult enough to be real! Kudos.

Hey dude, thanks for buying the app and those nice things you said!

I'll be adding plus and minus buttons to either side of the sliders in a future update to make setting price/salary/etc much easier.

There is a bug right now which causes the back button not to appear sometimes - fixed it yesterday and it'll be in the next build.

Thanks again, broseph!

Alternating days: How did that work out for you?

Pretty much great in every sense.

From a launch perspective: I had a mailing list of 1600 people built up before launch thanks to getting mentioned on places like Buzzfeed, BetaList etc

From a skills perspective: I already had some (though very limited) app marketing experience but when launch came around I had spoken to so many journalists that I knew

1) where I wanted to get mentioned 2) how to communicate what the app is about (something I struggled with A LOT at the start).

From a day-to-day perspective: great too as it added a nice variety to my week.

Looks fun, definitely gonna give this a try.

But where are you going to find a $300 pool table? That seems absurdly cheap :)

Congrats on the launch. FYI, there's a small typo in your copy: should be Dragons' Den.

Good catch, thanks.

Maybe your screenshot shouldn't be insulting to actual developers.

In what way is it insulting?

Also... the entire game is tongue-in-cheek.

Yep, I'm kinda confused by this too dude.

Bear in mind that I'm a developer :D

As an actual developer, I don't understand what about screenshot is insulting. Enlighten me.

Gah. Looks like my crappy web server has fallen over.

Here's a link to the app on the App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hipster-ceo/id731368826

And to truly be hipster; iOS only.

Normally iOS-only apps annoy me. In this case though, it is completely appropriate.

Haha, this is awesome :)

We built something similar last weekend in Node Knockout: http://startuplife.io. Not nearly as polished or complete as Hipster CEO, but maybe nice for Android users :)

Looks nice, buddy. Well done!

From the top appstore review

> the only problem is there's no tutorial, and it take a long time to even launch your product

I'm not sure whether or not it's supposed to be a joke. But I found it pretty funny nonetheless.

Life imitating art imitating life? :D

So has anyone given it a play yet?

Yes, I gave it a couple of plays some days ago.

It is a bit buggy, I experienced several crashes on my iPhone 4S. It is a bit hard to get the business going, and you can very easily get your company owned by investors that makes all sorts of changes to your business :-)

Yes, it's quite a fun game, similar to Game Dev Tycoon if you've played that.

There were crashes in the first release but it seems to be fixed now.

I bought it, but it kind of just stops after you name your company and product. You read two emails, then you're left on your own to figure out how to do stuff.

> You read two emails, then you're left on your own to figure out how to do stuff.

So, it's just like real life.

I get a 503 when trying to access the page :/