San Fran Sim — a startup tycoon game where the rollercoaster is your MRR chart
San Fran Sim is a free startup simulator game that runs entirely in your browser — no download, no account, no tutorial videos narrated by a man who says “crush it”. You found a software startup in a San Francisco garage and try to grow it from one founder and a folding table to an IPO, through every stereotype the city can throw at you.
Think Theme Hospital’s comedy crossed with RollerCoaster Tycoon’s economy: an isometric office full of tiny employees, a dry British announcer narrating your mistakes, and an MRR chart with genuine drops in it.
How to play
- Ship features. Your team turns Sprint Points into product. Growth features pull signups, retention features cut churn, monetisation lifts conversion. Bigger features ship more chaos.
- Squash bugs. Bugs breed in low-quality code and block your roadmap until fixed — a real engineering tax, not a mini-game.
- Hire carefully. Engineers, QA, designers, salespeople, a data scientist to unlock investor metrics — and manage the raises, promotions, disputes and burnout that come with them.
- Survive the money. Salaries, rent, servers and marketing against your MRR. Runway is always shorter than it looks. VCs are available, at a price written on page four.
- Grow the office. Garage → co-working desk → SoMa loft → mid-rise → tower, each with rooms that genuinely change your team’s stats: espresso bars, games rooms, nap pods, one ball pit.
- Mind the ecosystem. Rivals clone you and undercut your pricing, journalists call, the landlord reads TechCrunched, and Goggle eventually ships your feature — worse, and free.
Learn real startup metrics by playing
Every number in the game is real SaaS arithmetic: MRR, ARR, churn, ARPU, LTV, CAC, burn multiple, Rule of 40. The in-game metrics board explains each one in plain English as you play — what it means, what moves it, and why investors read that line first. People have learned pricing elasticity from this game against their will.
Free, in your browser, no account
San Fran Sim is a single-player business simulation built with deterministic simulation under the hood — same seed, same run. Your save lives in your own browser. It’s free to play; the ad slots down the side of the screen are rentable by real sponsors (yes, really — enquire), and our traffic stats are public, because transparency is funnier.
San Fran Sim — an isometric startup management game. Ship features, squash bugs, survive the burn rate — and keep the kombucha stocked.