You can build anything now.
That's exactly the problem.
Shippr is judgment at both ends of the build. Proof that someone wants it — before you spend a dollar. Proof that it survives real users — before they find out it doesn't.
12 questions · 5 minutes · no card · your 3 worst gaps, ranked
Everything worked.
That was the problem.
Someone raises a little money, or saves it. They hire a team. The team is good — they build exactly what was asked for. Nine months later there's a working product nobody asked for, nothing stopping a competitor cloning it in a weekend, and no honest way to explain where the money went.
Nobody wanted it.
Months of building, then a launch into silence. The demand was assumed in week one and never tested again.
Anyone can copy it.
It works. People want it. And a competent team clones the whole thing in a weekend, because the product was the only advantage.
Nobody will pay.
Users who love it for free and vanish at a price. You end up with an audience instead of a business.
You built the hard part first.
A scaling architecture for a product with no users. The expensive engineering landed before anything proved it was worth engineering.
None of this is the team's fault.
A team you hire will build what you ask for — that's the job, and a good one does it well. Deciding what to ask for was never their job. It's yours, and nobody hands you a method for it. So we wrote one down.
We've scored 1,645 AI-built apps. Almost all had the code. Almost none had the judgment.
Built by engineers & designers who shipped at
- Apple
- CBS
- Rackspace
- BCGDV
- Converse
- Uproxx
- Cutwater
- Geekdom
- Saatchi & Saatchi
Two gates. Four stages.
The Demand Gate™ decides whether you should build it. The Launch Gate™ decides whether you can ship it. Everything that matters happens between them — and most money is lost by skipping straight to the middle.
Where are you right now?
- 01 Validate Prove someone wants it. we teach it
- 02 Prototype Build only what proves it. we teach it
- 03 Harden Make it survive real users. we run it
- 04 Prove Earn the certificate that says so. we run it
We teach the first half. We run the second. · No agent can tell you whether a stranger wants your product — that is your work, and anyone selling you an automated answer to it is selling you a guess. Stages 1 and 2 are a written method you run yourself. Stages 3 and 4 are the Crew, on your app, doing the work.
Four proofs. Clear them before you build.
Each one has a proof that costs days and a version that costs months. You want the days. Miss one and you don't have a build problem — you have a proof problem, and building will not solve it.
Pull
Does anyone actually want this? Someone who isn't your friend, investor, or employee asked for it in their own words — or is already doing it badly by hand. Enthusiasm is not pull. Pull is someone trying to use it before it exists.
Edge
Why doesn't this get copied? If a competent team cloned you this month, name the one thing they still wouldn't have. A feature is not an edge — it's a to-do list for whoever copies you.
Price
Will someone pay, and how much? A deposit, a signature, a paid pilot — money moved before the thing was finished. "I'd definitely pay for that" is not a payment.
Order
What has to be true first? Of everything unproven, one assumption would kill the whole thing if it turned out false. Prove that one. Not the easy one that feels like progress.
Cheapest Proof First™
For any assumption you're about to bet months on: what is the least you can make to find out you're wrong? Ask five people. Watch one work. Put up a page with a real price. Do it by hand behind a form. Each rung answers a different question, and each costs days instead of quarters. Never spend build-money on a conversation-sized question.
A red proof found in week one costs you a week. Found in month nine it costs you the round. The full Demand Gate™ playbook — every decision tree, every trap — ships in the Blueprint Pack, included with membership.
The Smallest Provable Thing™
Not a small version of your product. The smallest thing that settles the one question still in doubt. "MVP" now means a full product with the polish removed — every screen, auth, settings, an admin panel, shipped tired. That isn't minimal and it proves nothing.
Scope by subtraction
Default everything to fake.
Name the one question. Name the one user — a human you can call, not a segment. Draw the one path they walk, in six boxes or fewer. Then make everything fake except the part that would make the answer meaningless if you faked it. That part is the build, and it's usually startlingly small.
Write down what you cut and the trigger that un-cuts it. Without that list, "we'll add it later" is a promise nobody trusts — and the team builds it anyway.
Then harden it →Build it in LAPP Order™ — Landing → Auth → Pricing → Product. That order exists because it puts the parts that prove the business ahead of the parts that merely build the product. The things builders bolt on last and break first, built first.
It works.
Now it has to survive.
Real users change the question. It stops being "does anyone want this" and becomes "what breaks when they arrive." That's the half we don't teach — we run it, on your app.
Stage 3 · Find
Know exactly where you stand.
Twelve questions. Five minutes. One number, 0–100 — and your three worst gaps, named in plain words. The ones a senior engineer would fix first. Not 400 findings you'll never read.
Get your score →Stage 3 · Fix
Fix it right. One call at a time.
Every gap comes with the exact fix, written for your builder — Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor. Paste it in. We verify it worked before moving on. One fix a day, and you learn why it mattered.
Meet the Crew →# Paste this into your builder Turn on row-level security for every table. Add a policy so each user can only read and write their own rows. Then show me one test proving user A cannot read user B's data. # ends with a verification step ↑
The Launch Gate™
The other bookend. The Demand Gate™ said you should build it; this one says you can ship it. Both are binary, and neither bends.
Stage 4 · Prove
Then prove it.
Twelve gates green earns the Launch Gate™ certificate. No "mostly passed." Something to show a customer, an investor, a partner — the second they ask.
See pricing →
Launch Gate™ Certified
all 12 gates · green · verified
Senior judgment, written down.
Judgment isn't a vibe. It's a method — run a hundred times, named, written down. The pre-build half you run yourself; the rest is wired into the product.
Reference Architecture™
The calls a senior architect makes. Authorization as the real boundary. Billing as a ledger you can't overwrite. Complexity that grows inward. Principles, not products.
Blueprint Pack
One playbook per hard problem. Follow the pattern instead of guessing your way to production.
Glow-Up Map™
Your score becomes a 30-day plan. One fix a day. You always know which rung you're on — and what the next one is.
Do-I-Need-That-Yet™
Half of senior judgment is knowing what you don't need yet. We'll save you the weekend building something a 40-user app will never touch. A scanner can't make that call.
Six specialists. You never have to pick one.
Six agents. One senior specialist's judgment each — architecture, scale, reliability, security, operations. You never pick between them. Talk in plain words and the right one shows up. If you have to ask "which one do I use?" — that's our bug, not yours.
The Architect
Your senior lead. Reads the whole app, scores its production-readiness, and hands each gap to the right specialist — worst-first.
The Bouncer flagship
Your security specialist — the four gates that decide who's allowed to touch what. Locks the doors before real users arrive.
The Firefighter
Reliability and incidents — errors, backups, monitoring. Makes sure a bad day is a bad hour, not a lost business.
The Framer
Your architect. How it's built to hold up — load and database — and, half the time, the honest "you don't need that yet."
The Sherpa
Turns your score into a 30-day, one-fix-a-day Glow-Up Map™ — and teaches you your own app so you can keep it alive.
The Green-Light
The binary verdict — certified or not. A certificate that never bends is a certificate worth showing anyone.
Twelve gates.
Miss one and your users find it.
Every score, fix, and certificate runs these twelve — the list a senior team runs before they'd put their name on a launch. Security is four. The other eight are what actually breaks.
Including AI-native calls the last generation of tools never made — like keeping your inference behind a swappable adapter, so one model outage doesn't take you down.
Other tools review a diff.
We judge the bet and the build.
A senior team's judgment, in words you already understand.
| Do nothing | AI chat | Scanner | Agency audit | ⬢ Shippr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knows what to fix first | ✕ | generic | 400 issues | once | always, worst-first |
| Tells you what not to build yet | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | partly | every audit |
| Hands you the exact fix | ✕ | partly | ✕ | partly | paste-in, verified |
| Teaches you your own app | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | Glow-Up Map™ |
| Always on, not one-time | — | partly | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Certifies production-readiness | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | partly | binary Launch Gate™ |
| Never touches your infra | ✓ | ✓ | partly | ✕ | ✓ |
Lives in your terminal. Talks like a person.
Install the Crew into Claude Code once. Then just talk. Say "audit my app" — the right agent wakes up, finds what won't hold, hands you the fix. No menus. No config.
Add the .skill bundle to Claude Code — one import, six agents.
Say audit my app or paste your .env — The Architect wakes up on its own.
Each finding goes to the right specialist by name. You paste the fix. The number moves.
Or bring in the humans behind the agents.
Ship School™ — six weeks, eight seats, on Zoom. The senior engineers and designers behind the agents, who shipped at Apple, CBS and BCG Digital Ventures, walk you through all four stages — including the two we otherwise only teach on paper. The Demand Gate™ run live, on your idea, with people who have killed their own.
Explore Ship School →The six weeks
- 00Kickoff
Score your real app, live. Meet the Crew — the people, not the agents.
- 01Lock the doors
Secrets, auth, data, input — who's allowed to touch what. First.
- 02When it breaks
Errors, backups, monitoring — so a bad day isn't a lost business.
- 03When it's loved
Load and database under real traffic — and what you don't need yet.
- 04Taking money safely
Payments, PII, and the operations to run it.
- 05Know your own app
Your 30-day Glow-Up Map™, built with you. Open office hours.
- 06Prove it
Live certification review. You graduate Launch Gate™ certified.
One membership.
Everything we do.
No tiers to compare. No feature matrix. No "enterprise" step where the real judgment quietly lives. You join, and you get the whole thing — the agents, the room, and two live sessions every week.
A fractional CTO costs $2,500 a month. This is the same judgment — plus a room full of builders doing the same work — for $149.
- The full Crew — all six agents, self-routing
- Every gate, every audit — no daily cap
- Up to 3 apps
- Cheat Codes library + Blueprint Pack
- Launch Gate™ certification + public verify page
- Monthly re-score
- Private member Slack
- The Crew's humans are in it — not a bot
- Every playbook, every recording, kept forever
- Lifetime alumni channel once you certify
- Teaching session — one gate, proof or playbook a week. Every member, no cap. Recorded.
- Office Hours & Teardown — open to every member, with two hot-seat slots per call: your real app pulled apart live.
- Two slots a call is the honest number. Live teardowns don't scale — we add calls, never slots.
Score and harden a whole cohort in one install. From $7,500 per cohort, up to 30 founders.
Portfolio-wide production-readiness. $1,500 per company, per batch.
Founding 200: the Membership at $99/mo, annual only, locked for life — in exchange for publishing your case study and score journey. · 30-Point Guarantee: +30 points in 30 days or a full refund, and you keep everything. Graduate a cohort without a certified app and the year is refunded. We never guarantee "no breaches."
Where does your app really stand?
Get your Shippr score.
Twelve honest questions. One per gate. Five minutes to your number and your three worst gaps. It's a self-check — the Crew verifies it for real.