The benefits of participating in a hackathon is one of those topics that will always be discussed. Each side has its own arguments. Collaboration, hype, team spirit - some say. "And what?" others answer frowningly and economically.
Participation in hackathons, in its cyclical structure, is very reminiscent of one-time acquaintances on Tinder: people get to know each other, find common interests, do business, perhaps a photo for memory, and naturally disperse, again starting to actively search for fresh sensations and knowledge. Those very 48 hours remain in my memory as a bright moment - and only occasionally meetings at hackathons (and on dates too) grow into serious projects. It is all the more interesting to take a closer look at the stories of startups that did not grow up within the walls of the MIT campus or during the protracted brainstorms of Google teams, but from the spontaneous association of several young people at the next hackathon.
Feedback is our everything
One of the reasons why Markus Tan, Lucas Ngu and Kek Xu Ryu decided to participate in the Singapore version of Startup Weekend 2012 was that the event was held within the walls of their native National University of Singapore. For each of them, this was the first hackathon and the stated goal of participation was ordinary - “to make a cool project that will help solve an important problem.” The result of 54 hours of hard work, desperate arguments and intermittent sleep was the unconditional victory of the SnapSell application prototype, a familiar mobile variation on the marketplace theme in our time, where users sell and buy a variety of things from each other.
However, the typical hackathon victory story has evolved. “Through our landing page, we received several hundred emails, we even received tweets asking if we could download the app right now. This gave us the confidence to move on: to collect a team and leave work,” recalls Kek Xiu Ryu. Two months later, young people simultaneously wrote letters of resignation and began to turn a good idea into a working application for iOS.
It will be two full years before the company, which has changed its name to Carousell, will raise $800 in a seed round. By mid-2018, when the founders celebrated their sixth anniversary since the launch of the project, and the total amount of transactions made through Carousell was more than $ 5 billion, almost every resident of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand already knew about their application. General fame and record turnover helped to attract large investments - Asian and American investors have invested in the company over 126 million dollars.
Necessary people
Most likely, Talis Gomez did not know anything about Uber when he was going to the hackathon in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. According to Gomez, he developed the idea for an app to monitor buses. Everything changed after he had to spend half an hour at a bus stop in the pouring rain waiting for a taxi. The Easy Taxi app, with which you can order and track the location of a designated taxi, easily won the Startup Weekend hackathon. The event with the highest concentration of young and active guys from all over South America gave Gomez the main thing - purposeful, burning with the idea of partners with whom he could go through the fire, water and copper pipes of subsequent pitches, search for investments and hard work on the application.
Easy Taxi is now one of the world's largest ride hailing services, operating in 30 countries and regularly gobbling up less fortunate competitors in Spanish-speaking markets. So, at the beginning of 2019, a deal was made to take over the Spanish company Cabify, the most famous uber-like service in Spain. Perhaps they, too, should have started by looking for a team at the hackathon?
Do whatever it takes to get noticed
A similar story happened with Aftership, one of the most famous parcel tracking services, which has fans in Russia as well. Andrew Chen and Teddy Chen met under the roof of the Hong Kong stage of Startup Weekend. Immediately after the victory, the future celebrities of online retail threw all their strength and the cash prize they received into the election campaign - in order to win the hearts of business angels, they had to win the SW2011 global stage. The 90-second video about the project, required by the rules of the competition, did not shine with quality - the partners made it in a few hours using services for animating slides and integrating English voice acting (both spoke very average English).
“Our story went viral and that's the main reason we won the global tour. We achieved that 7 publications wrote about us and each article had a link to vote for us. One cool publication called us “three idiots” and after that the whole of Hong Kong knew about us. About 5000 people voted for us - not such a big number. The victory [in the world stage] was a surprise for us, but we were just happy,” Andrew later wrote on a corporate blog.
Often the most difficult task for an artist, writer, director is the transformation of crumpled thoughts into an understandable text, sketch or finished script. Hackathons are just about that. They provide an environment where you can turn an abstract idea into lines of code, thumbnails of application pages, and plastic prototypes in record time. And then - get feedback and decide whether to do something about it further. There is at least one common characteristic for all startups born from the ashes, empty coffee cups and banana peels left after the next hackathon - the idea and its initial incarnation were too good to “throw everything like that”.
Many potential startups like to repeat that in the version of the Universe where there is Apple, Facebook, Uber and Amazon, it is difficult to come up with something fundamentally new and really large-scale. Meanwhile, the practice of world hackathons and startup challenges shows that there are still chances to leave a mark in eternity, or at least make good money on a cool idea. Of course, single purpose is clearly not enough. We need a “critical mass”, that minimum concentration of talented people at which there are “collisions” of the necessary characters and competencies.
The “Digital Breakthrough” hackathon from the “Russia – Land of Opportunity” platform is the very event, the scale of which is sufficient to provide a “nutrient environment” for world-class startups. Judge for yourself: 40 cities of the regional stage, a prize fund of 10 million rubles and a grant fund of 200 million rubles. Perhaps you are the very IT specialist, designer or manager whose project will become the embodiment of this digital breakthrough. Until you try, you won't know. Do not be afraid of your ideas, boldly recruit a team and change the world!
Source: habr.com