What it’s like having your hackathon ripped off
There’s a lot of different emotions our team is experiencing right now, but it’s hard to describe how it feels without telling you a bit of our story first.
On a cold Thursday night this past February, I went to a small tech meetup for the first time. We met at a coffee shop, introduced ourselves, and swapped stories. Suddenly Ahmed, the youngest guy in the group, suggested a crazy idea: Let’s do a hackathon.
The older guys in the group were a bit skeptical, they knew from experience running a hackathon would be a mountain of work. Coincidentally I had been to one recently and had seriously considered helping out with one. So I said let’s do it. Eventually everyone in our group agreed to contribute any way they could. Just like that we had started 6Hack.
For the next 5 months we had countless work sessions with Leo, Daiton, Kevin, Laura, and Pamela, Joel and Ahmed had a ton of pitches with venues and sponsors, and the team held late night calls to make sure we had everything together. We finally launched our first Hack the 6 event in June. We managed to book one of the coolest co-working spaces in the city Project: OWL and held our judging at Soho House Toronto. We made too many rookie mistakes to count, but somehow we’d made it through the beta.
Just a few months later we started a partnership with The Collections, a fashion brand that runs some of the most exclusive events at Toronto Fashion Week. For helping them build their media event app they were gracious enough to provide us with backstage passes and seats at some of the top runway shows. The hard work that Eve, Kunnal, Mark, and the rest of the development team put in was worth it.
After that we thought the sky was the limit. We started planning the launch for The Collections app at their next fashion week and the details for our next hackathon in January.
Then this past week we stumbled across this:
We were completely shocked and couldn’t believe it.
Nspire Innovation, the largest student run business and tech non-profit in Canada, was launching a hackthon.
But not just any hackathon. One with essentially our name, our branding, even the hashtag we used for Twitter, and coincidentally around the same time we were planning to do our next one.
So how does it feel to have two of the biggest non-profit business organizations in Canada rip off your work?
After all the time and effort we’ve put in it feels terrible and great at the same time. It’s not great that they’re doing it, but it’s also small proof that maybe we’re on to something. I wonder if the teams at AirBnB, Homejoy, and Fab felt the same punch in the gut when the Samwer brothers cloned their startups. Whether it’s a carbon copy or not the feeling’s still the same.
I guess success, no matter how small, really does breed competition. The funny thing is, if either group had asked us, we would’ve jumped at the chance to work with them and put all our resources into making it a success. Unfortunately, when we reached out to the event organizers Nspire, they claimed theirs was unique because it was under their umbrella. They should release an iPhone under their umbrella and see how Apple responds.
Nspire does want to compete with us on fair terms with their own branding, their own design, and their own concept, we wish them the best of luck and hope they succeed.
If they want to continue stealing what we’ve spent over 10 months brainstorming, creating and growing there’s really nothing we can do to stop them.
They just shouldn't continue to claim that they support innovators.
** Edit: We we’re contacted by MaRS and they notified us that they were unaware of the situation and were simply acting as venue sponsors. **
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