Dear developers who are joining our Startup Asia Hackathon this weekend, I’m sure you have prepared your guns, gathered up your team, and picked the challenges you want to compete in. The hackathon is just around the corner, so I hope you’re focused and ready.
But just in case you need some presentational and strategic pointers for our Bandung event, let me share some hackathon tips I found when I got myself lost on Quora last night.
These tips come from John Sheehan (the superbly-titled developer evangelist at Twilio) and we think they’re so great and helpful we’re just going to share John’s top tips with you here. But please do check out the original post as well because it’s full of useful ideas from all sorts of people in the comments section.
Show up ready to play
The moment pitches are over and teams are formed you should be ready to push code to a live, publicly addressable server within minutes. Do not waste your first few hours fighting with hosting account setup, dev environment setup, creating accounts on your APIs of choice, etc. Register a domain using a made up word and use it as your project’s code name (in fact, don’t spend two seconds discussing names before building anything, it will come naturally and you’ll have a code name to fall back on).
Designers are king
The key to winning a hackathon is a good demo. Almost universally the best demos not only work but look good. Designers, if they even show up at the event, will be in high demand. Actively recruit them to your team. You’re looking for a sexy prototype, not a final polished product.
Show, don’t tell
In your presentation, give the audience something tangible. Avoid slides at all costs. Don’t talk about what isn’t there, people are smart enough to fill in the gaps. Focus on the problem being solved. Do not talk about the technology behind it unless that is somehow relevant to the problem being solved. Show examples of real people using it. Have someone work on the pitch exclusively from the beginning.
Build something awesome
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