Preparing for a Hackathon
I once posted an answer to a friend’s question: Guys, how to win hackathon, and I thought I should expand on it.
I’ve attended and won (or at least made it to the finals of) a number of hackathons. The latest one I’ve attended was AngelHack KL, and although we didn’t win first prize, we were told that we were so close to winning the hack. We’ve also received a lot of feedback from the judges, sponsors, and acquaintances encouraging us to bring the product to market and make it a reality.
We did, of course—when you have government officials and technology leaders all asking you to bring a product to market, that’s a good sign—and I think it’s going to be an interesting next few months. :)
In my experience, there are two ingredients to the secret sauce:
There must be a valid problem to solve. A very specific, but otherwise a valid problem. The one we were trying to solve in #ahkl2015 was: I work with this girl, and her birthday is coming up, and I got invited to her birthday. What should I give her? (true story btw)
There’s a magic twist. Hackathons are all about innovation. Back in 2011, cab-hailing apps were nowhere to be found, and if you made one, you’d probably win. Not now, because the space is very crowded, and the “twist” isn’t so magical anymore (using your phone’s GPS to show the other cabs around and show your cab where you want to be picked up).
The first ingredient is quite “easy” to figure out. You’ll definitely have an abundance of small personal issues you’d love to see solved. You just need to brainstorm with some of your friends and focus your idea into something that’s polished and interesting.
The second ingredient is a bit more complicated since you really need that special idea to transform a boring solution into a magical one. I suggest looking at the theme and the sponsors to see how their offerings will help give that additional kick to your solution.
For our team, we initially started with just sending the recipient of the gift a survey, but we made the twist magical by making a damn-smart-machine-learning-algorithm to figure out the recipient’s personality and suggest a gift for them.
Hackathons are not just all about technical chops. I’ve seen teams with developers waaaay better than ours. There are developers who are 100 times better, but they are probably sleeping on the weekend instead of participating. Having enough tech skills to pull off making a product is a given; that’s why you have to compete on the creativity of the solution.
There are also a lot of management skills required in a hackathon. You’ll initially have a grand idea of what to build, but eventually you’ll realize that you don’t have time to implement everything. You will need to rescope and reprioritize all the time (yes, even in the last hour). You will have to cut a feature you thought was critical, but since you can’t implement it on time, you will have to work around it. You will never ship a perfect product, but one that you can live with and pitch.
Next up: Choosing your deployment platform