Junction: growth or bust
Growth is good, but when it comes to hackathons and participant numbers bigger is not always better. What do you do when it doesn’t make sense to grow anymore?
Switch categories and rethink what “growth” means to you.
Before diving too deep into the future, lets consider the three things that have enabled Junction to grow insanely quickly in the last two years:
Word of mouth induced by sheer size
By building Junction nearly 3x bigger in 2016 we were able to reach a far wider audience. More people experiencing Junction means more people talking about Junction. Simple as that. Scaling to 1300 hackers was a huge risk especially considering most complaints from 2015 stemmed from having too many participants. Strategically however the move made sense. Give 3x as many people an unforgettable and incredibly unique hackathon experience and watch your word of mouth sky rocket.
Branding that delivers emotion
Like it or not people, and yes even hackers, are driven by emotions. Emotions help people make sense of the world and moreover an experience tied with unique or extreme emotions will become deeply ingrained in the mind. Junction 2016 seriously brought out the stops and as a result the event was unforgettable. Unforgettable is great for marketing, word of mouth, and consequently growth.
We even brought a laser to Junction 2016:
An organizing team driven by audacious goals
Still by far the most important ingredient for Junction’s growth has been the blood, sweat, and tears of a stellar organizing team. But stellar organizing teams don’t just appear out of nowhere. They need an audacious goal to rally around and good leadership to help take them there. In the beginning building Junction to become the biggest in Europe from scratch was excitement enough. That goal was almost too easy to reach and the following year the participant target of course had to be tripled to a ridiculous 1500 hackers. Regardless of the metric a clear big, hairy, and scary goal has been key for inspiring and getting the most out of a rock solid organizing team.
What audacious goals to tackle next?
Without another larger than life goal to work towards, motivation, progress, and the best people will slip through the cracks. What are the next audacious goals that Junction can work towards?
One which Junction already touched on in 2016 was that of luring international tech talent to consider permanent residence in Finland. This manifested in a meeting area where hackers could discuss different career opportunities and job openings with Finnish startups and tech companies.
Finland should be doing everything possible to convince the world’s best doers to move here.
-Ilkka Paananen, CEO Supercell
The CEO of Europe’s first decacorn has been often quoted as saying Finland will soon face, and is already facing, a shortage of tech talent. Junction gathers hundreds of developers and designers from abroad every year. In 2016 over 50% of hackers were from outside of Finland. By introducing this foreign talent to the local tech scene and presenting Finland as a viable place to live some of this shortage can be made up.
Junction Community
Outside of potentially becoming a very valuable talent pool, Junction inherently still faces the seasonality problem: Junction occurs only once per year. By creating a Junction Community that exists in some shape or form around the calendar year this tech talent pool becomes far more consistant and easier to access.
Outside of recruiting, a community could have many other benefits as well. Consider a year-round Junction Community that is an easy platform from which to launch any tech related project. Or a community that not only inspires tech projects year round but also provides education in tech. The possibilities are many. (The seeds of a Junction Community may have already been planted in the shape of a hardware lab inside of the Startup Sauna in Otaniemi! 😉)
Foreseeing the future is as difficult as always but the old adage remains; the easiest way to predict the future is to create it. Or in Junction talk:
The easiest way to see the future is to hack it.
Happy hacking!
This is a 5 story series about my journey as Recruiting Team Member and later Head of Marketing for Junction, the world’s most exciting hackathon. Read the other stories:
