From first app to WWDC winner: Leandro Tolaini’s Shipaton story

As part of this year’s Shipaton, we’re highlighting stories from past participants to show what’s possible when you commit to building in public. Whether you’re aiming to sharpen your skills, launch your first product, or maybe even win, these interviews are meant to spark ideas, share learnings, and inspire you to take part in Shipaton.

We’re also including their tips on how to get the most out of Shipaton, from choosing the right idea to managing your time to pushing through the inevitable bugs and blockers.

First up: Leandro Tolaini, a computer science student from France who participated in last year’s Shipaton. When he stumbled across a tweet about the event, he was just one month into learning iOS development and had never released an app before:

“The timing was perfect,” Leandro says over our video call. “I had one free month before school started again, and I thought, why not take part in this and actually build something?”

Building Abs God

Leandro’s idea for his Shipaton project came from something simple and personal: Leandro wanted a better ab workout app. That’s it. No grand business model, no huge feature roadmap; just a clear problem he personally wanted solved.

“I wanted a summer body,” he laughs. “But more seriously, I wanted to build an app that was simple, clean, and did exactly what I needed.”

Leandro did what every app developer should do as the first step before starting any development, he started by looking at what was already out there. It turned out that many fitness apps on the App Store were cluttered, visually dated, or overloaded with upselling and unnecessary features. Others charged high subscription prices but didn’t offer much value in return.

What Leandro wanted didn’t seem to exist — a well-designed native app with straightforward functionality and pricing that made sense. That insight gave him inspiration and direction needed to start working on his first actual mobile app.

“It felt like there was a niche there in just a clean, focused app that looked good and worked well.”

Since he now had an idea,  the only thing that was needed was the hard part: actually building the app. Before that he would also need to learn how to build an app.

Learning by Doing

One of Leandro’s goals with Shipaton was simple: learn as much as he could. He joined solo, without a team, and started building with SwiftUI and SwiftData. Before this he had barely touched these two tools.

“I basically just brute forced it,” he said. “Eight hours a day, every day, for a month. It was intense, but I was really enjoying it. There’s just something when you’re building for yourself.”

Learning while building was far from smooth. SwiftUI was powerful, but at times unpredictable. Newer APIs like SwiftData were under-documented, and many of the tutorials using it had outdated information. Features that seemed easy and straightforward to implement, ended up requiring hours of debugging, googling and asking ChatGPT. 

“If I got stuck on something for too long, I would either try to find a workaround or change the feature. I didn’t want to burn time being stuck.”

Leandro leaned on the community for support. Searching Apple developer forums, asking questions on X, and watching tutorials late into the night. Biggest help, however, was ChatGPT, which most often pointed in the right direction, at least.

“That was a big part of it. Just knowing how to ask for help and where to look.”

And while the code wasn’t perfect — “very messy and unmaintainable” in his own words — it worked. The app shipped. And that was the goal.

Monetizing Abs God

When it came time to monetize, which is one of the requirements of Shipaton, Leandro decided to keep things simple. Fitness apps are known to convert well (learn more from the health and fitness app section in this year’s State of subscription apps report). They tap into strong habits and motivation cycles, and users are often willing to commit for longer periods if they believe the app will help them stay on track. Similarly how people are very hopeful when joining the gym, signing up for a year from the start.

Initially, Leandro considered launching with both a free and premium tier. But time was running short, and Shipaton’s deadline required that the first version of the app be live on the App Store. After weighing the tradeoffs, he went with a 7-day free trial followed by a hard paywall.

“It wasn’t ideal, but I just needed to get it out there. I didn’t want to miss the deadline.”

Setting up monetization with RevenueCat turned out to be surprisingly smooth. Despite never having used the SDK before,  Leandro got everything integrated quickly. The tougher part was dealing with App Store Connect.

“Apple rejected the app several times, and it was never super clear why. That was the most stressful part.”

Still, he got it through and just in time. And while he didn’t go viral or hit the top charts, he managed to bring in a handful of paying users and earned around $100-200.

“It covered my Apple developer license. That already felt like a win.”

What Leandro Got Out of Shipaton

When asked to reflect on the experience, Leandro didn’t hesitate: the most valuable part of Shipaton was how much it pushed him to grow fast.

“I went from knowing nothing about shipping apps to actually having something live. That’s not something school ever really taught me.”

The confidence boost was real. Suddenly, building an app wasn’t a hypothetical. It had become something he had done. Doing it in public helped even more. Sharing updates on X connected him with other developers, helped him get unstuck when he hit roadblocks, and gave him feedback he could act on quickly.

“Before that, I felt kind of isolated as a dev. Shipaton made me feel like part of a community.”

In addition to connections and confidence to build apps from scratch, Shipaton had an even bigger impact waiting for him. “For me, Shipaton gave me the confidence to build my second app in such a short time, which led to being selected as a Distinguished Winner of the Swift Student Challenge 2025 and getting invited to WWDC25,” he says.

Plans for This Year’s Shipaton

Leandro isn’t done with Shipaton. He’s planning to participate again this year, and his next app idea leans even harder into the fun side of fitness.

The concept? An app that uses the Screen Time API to force you to do push-ups before you can unlock your social media apps.

“It started as a joke, like, wouldn’t it be funny if you had to earn your Instagram time? But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.”

It’s playful but rooted in behavior change. The kind of idea that catches attention and makes people smile, but might also help them build healthier habits. He’s already started prototyping, and plans to share updates again as he builds.

“I’m probably not posting as obsessively as last year,” he says, smiling. “But I’ll definitely be building in public again.”

Advice for Shipaton Participants

We wrapped up by asking Leandro what advice he’d give to anyone thinking of joining Shipaton this year.

To anyone who’s hesitant to join a hackathon because they’ve never built an app before or don’t feel ‘skilled enough’: just jump into it. You have nothing to lose, and you’ll be amazed by how much you can learn in such a short amount of time.

He emphasized how welcoming the indie developer and iOS communities are, especially on X, and how much that helped him stay motivated. More than anything, he encouraged builders to be themselves.

“Don’t try to act like a company. Saying things like ‘we are looking into it’, when it’s just you makes things sound very unauthentic.”

His final tip? Add a little surprise.

“Even just one small thing,  like a fun animation or an unexpected feature, can make your app more memorable and fun in the eyes of the user.”

Want to build your own story?

Shipaton 2025 is open. Build and launch a real app, integrate RevenueCat, and you could win up to $60K — or even end up in Times Square.

👉 Join Shipaton