You have one hour, one idea, and a market that has seen it before.
Most runs end with an investor politely passing. That is not a difficulty setting — that is the game.
1 HOUR STARTUP is a business simulator about the decisions founders actually make, and the arithmetic that decides whether those decisions survive contact with a cap table.
THE RUN
Every run starts with a founder, not a company. Twelve attributes, an assigned archetype, one reroll, and an honest answer about how much of your own money and time you are putting in. Then pick a sector, pick an idea from over a hundred — or type your own — and start making calls.
Prove the problem is real. Shape the product: what you store, what you charge for, who you say no to. Build an MVP. Hire, or don't. Spend on growth, or keep the runway. Then something goes wrong, because something always does, and you take it to an investor.
THE LADDER
When someone does say yes, the run keeps going: Seed, Series A, B, C, D+, Unicorn.
Each round is priced by a real cap table. You give up equity to raise, and the percentage you hand over is the percentage you never get back. Valuations go down as well as up. A round can fail and leave you bridging to the next attempt. Companies run out of cash and die, and the game tells you which month it happened.
When you exit, the money is paid through a liquidation waterfall — preferences first, you last. A three million dollar exit against a five million dollar preference pays the founder nothing at all. The game will show you the zero.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE
Money you take off the table is yours. Exit a company, or sell part of your stake in a secondary, and it lands in a wallet that funds eight to twelve cheques at any balance.
That unlocks Investor HQ, where you read other companies' rounds, open the data room, and write cheques — or pass. Your positions dilute when they raise, mark up when they grow, and pay out through the same waterfall your own company used. Paper is not money until it is.
THE DOCUMENT YOU LEAVE WITH
Finish a run and the game writes a product specification out of the answers you gave: the problem, the customer, the pricing, the platform, what you deliberately said no to. Copy it to the clipboard or save it as a PDF. It is written to be handed to an AI build tool, and the honest part is the list of open questions at the end — every fact the game had to leave blank because you were never asked for it.
WHAT ELSE IS IN THERE
- 107 startup ideas across six verticals, each with its own way of going wrong
- 129 events, from a co-founder who has reread the vesting schedule to a spreadsheet that says you are two people too big
- 551 decision options, none of which is strictly the best one
- A daily challenge with a modifier and a streak
- My Ventures - every company you have ever run, and how each one ended
- A leaderboard of ranks and scores
HOW THIS APP MAKES MONEY, SAID PLAINLY
There are no ads and no in-app purchases. Nothing is for sale and nothing you could buy would change a score.
What there is: at the end of a run the game ranks 30 real build tools against the specification you just produced. Some of those links pay us a commission if you sign up. The game says so on the card itself, next to the link, and the ranking is computed without knowing which links pay - it is scored on fit to what you built. Tools that pay us nothing are ranked above tools that do whenever they fit better.
WHAT IS NOT IN THERE
No multiplayer, no chat, no friend lists. No account to create - the app signs in anonymously and never asks for your email. It asks once for a leaderboard name, which you roll from a word list rather than type, you can skip it, and you can change it any time in Settings.
A run takes about half an hour. Losing takes less.
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