While a coding bootcamp student, I won two hackathons. Actually, I lucked out and the teams I was with collectively won top prize. Here’s what happened:
Break The Banks Hackathon (Sponsor: Transferwise, IEX)
I was on my first month of coding bootcamp when I heard from my school that they had been asked to be one of the sponsors to this hackathon, held in December 2015. I joined by myself, too sheepish to ask any of my classmates to come with me.
But it was about how to use technology to break into the finance and banking, and I knew a little bit about the industry since I had spent a bit of my previous professional life in it, before I switched to being a developer.
The experience was great: I got to meet four other people whom I subsequently become friends with (outside the hackathon.) We banded together around the idea, which we dubbed Cronopio. The hack was designed to provide a way for competitive gamers to fund their participation in eGames. In a way, it was an alternative asset class for an industry that was just beginning to get general media attention.
Although I had signed up as a developer (with my limited coding bootcamp experience), it turned out that two of the five in our team were top notch programmers. There was not much I could add to either the front nor the back end. I focused, with my remaining team mates, on the presentation of the business side of the hack.
After all, if the market was not large nor attractive, there was no reason to even build the product. However, the market was large, and in fact, a blue ocean opportunity. We won some money (always a nice thing in a hackathon), but more importantly, the opportunity to present our project to the sponsors of the hackathon. These were Transferwise, the London-based funds transfer company, and IEX, which was still fighting to receive its exchange license. Here’s our repo and the pitch deck of the winning project.
My takeaway from this experience is that a) the hackathon idea should be great and b) you should be able to coherently explain the merits of the idea to the judges, and c) it really helps if everyone in the team is nice.