Startup Simulator: a turn-based startup strategy game for your phone

The thing that separates a good one from a reskinned idle game is whether the numbers interact. If cutting marketing spend does not visibly stall growth, you are tapping, not deciding. Startup Simulator: Growth Game runs turn-based on seven linked metrics — retention, revenue, CAC, burn, runway, infrastructure load and churn — and shows each option's projected effects and risks before you commit. It is free on iOS and Android, with a Founder Mode subscription that lifts the free limits.

Burn rate is the net cash a company loses per month: everything going out minus everything coming in. Founders watch it because it sets the deadline for everything else. Cash in the bank divided by monthly burn gives runway in months, so a hire, a server bill or a marketing push does not just cost money, it costs weeks of time. Gross burn counts only spending; net burn subtracts revenue and is the number that decides how long you have.

There is no universal number, because CAC only means something compared with what a customer is worth. Take total sales and marketing spend, divide by the customers it brought in, then set that against lifetime value. Software businesses often use a rough three-to-one ratio of value to cost, and a payback period under a year, as a health check. A low CAC with terrible retention is worse than a high CAC with customers who stay for years.

Because churn works against you every month while a signup only helps once. If five percent of customers leave each month, growth has to replace that five percent before it adds anything at all, and the bigger the base gets, the more of your acquisition budget goes to standing still. That is why retention improvements compound and signup pushes do not: reducing churn raises the value of every customer you already paid to acquire.

Post-mortem surveys keep landing on the same short list: running out of cash, building something not enough people wanted, being outcompeted, and problems inside the founding team. Those overlap more than they look. A company usually runs out of money because it spent the runway learning something it could have learned cheaper. The failure is rarely one dramatic decision; it is a sequence of reasonable-looking choices that each cost a few weeks of time.

It can make the vocabulary and the trade-offs familiar — what burn does to runway, why infrastructure spend and cash reserves pull in opposite directions, how a decision made on turn four bites on turn nine. What it cannot do is model your market, your customers or your team, and no game outcome predicts a real one. Treat Startup Simulator as a strategy game built on business mechanics, not as advice, a course, or a substitute for actual operating experience.

Yes, it is free to download on the App Store and Google Play. Free players get a daily challenge, the core metrics, and one full run every day. An optional Founder Mode subscription, monthly or yearly and cancellable at any time, removes those limits: unlimited turns per run, full AI advisor analysis on every decision, all difficulty modes from EASY through HARD, unlimited daily runs, and a bonus daily XP multiplier.

The advisor, Alex, produces a strategic briefing tuned to the state your company is currently in. It reads the live metrics — runway, retention, burn, infrastructure load — names the fire it thinks you should put out first, and lays out tactical considerations rather than generic startup platitudes. It is a game character giving in-game guidance about fictional numbers, not financial or business advice. Full advisor analysis on every decision is part of Founder Mode.

It runs on iPhone and Android, and it is rated 4+, meaning there is no objectionable content. That is a content rating rather than a recommendation: the game is dense reading about business metrics, crisis briefs and percentage changes, so the interest and reading level, not the rating, is the real gate. It also contains an optional Founder Mode subscription, so a device with purchases enabled can be charged.

Yes, and that is designed in. The game has multiple failure states — the clearest one being the runway countdown reaching zero before the company reaches a sustainable position. Decisions carry delayed side effects and hidden outcomes that only surface several turns later, so a run can be lost by something you chose long before it showed up in the numbers. Losing ends the run; progress and achievements carry across attempts, and the scenario replays differently.