I love hackathons. Since 2020, I’ve participated in over 10 and won around $65,000 in team and solo prizes. Now that my hackathon days are winding down (I am focusing on my cloud hosting platform sliplane.io), I want to share some tips that most developers miss.
Let's get you winning!
Humans > Tech
Developers love to talk about tech. I get it—we can discuss tech all day long! But ultimately, we’re building solutions for humans (sorry, aliens) and need to focus on them when thinking and talking about our projects.
Next time you pitch, dont start with: "We build a prototype with Next.js ...", but instead start with: "We want to help overworked nurses with...". Start with the what/why, not with the how!
Be Specific
You’re browsing the internet and see an ad for an "AI Innovation Hackathon." You think: NICE, I can finally build my GPT-powered blog post platform. But hold on! Check what the hackathon description says. Any clues? What are they looking for? Do they have any specific requirements? If they give you five judging criteria, make it super easy for them to judge.
Are they asking for the impact of your solution? Try to calculate the TAM (Total Adressable Market). Are they requiring great usability? Go test it with some random people on the street! Are they requiring to integrate their API, show them a breakdown of the integration!
Address every point individually and be super explicit!
Know the Jury
It’s suuuuper important to find out who will judge your project. Are they developers, marketing people, or domain specialists? Different things impress different people. If the judges are mostly non-technical, don't spend 2 of your 3 minutes talking about your awesome tech stack. Instead, focus on the problem you are solving. Techies usually love hard problems. If you pitch to techies, no one cares what web framework you used. Instead, talk about the hard stuff! What tradeoffs did you have to make?
Use their language, try to address their pains directly!
Don't show what is, show what could be
Thirty minutes left until submission. Oh no, you just remembered you need to submit a pitch video. You quickly open your screen recorder and do a walkthrough of your solution. You hit send, but you've already lost :(
Hackathon solutions are usually just hacked together and rarely complete. It's important to show not just what you did but also what the future could hold for your project. Make it vague enough to spark the jury’s imagination without being too difficult to follow. Balance what is and what could be. But be honest, no one likes a fraud!
Don’t just show what is, but also what could be!
Details Matter
Small details matter more than you think, especially to non-technical people. Projects that look and feel polish leave a better impression than technically impressive but half-finished projects. Maybe leave out 1 or 2 features and spend the last hours on polishing.
Pay attention to small animations, avoid dead links, ensure good design, and come up with great project branding
With these tips, you’ll be better prepared for your next hackathon. I hope you will win a bunch of money while still having fun :)
Thanks!
I don't really have anything to sell you (👀), but if you are fed up with the pricing of existing PaaS cloud hosting, check out what we are building at Sliplane
ALSO: What would be your tip number 6?
Top comments (2)
I feel like the hardest challenge is usually to come up with a useful initial idea that really addresses the problem. And to be fair, it’s extremely difficult without prior experience in the domain.
My Number 6: Build a great team and make some friends! Money isn't everything 😇