A hackathon or startup MVP, what’s the difference?

At the AT&T SHAPE Hackathon in Los Angeles © Lennart Frantzell

Back from the AT&T SHAPE Hackathon in Los Angeles, I am struck by how many of the over 40 teams who decided to write cognitive apps with Watson in 24 hours, could end up with what is awfully close to an MVP. I.e. a minimal viable product. An app that has enough functionality to meet at least one significant requirement from an early customer. Early customers who can give thumps ups to continued development

The term MVP was coined by Frank Robinson about 2001, and then popularized by Steve Blank, and Eric Ries, ass part of the Agile movement, and has long been used all over the startup community.

In the startup world a typical MVP is measured in a few months, say an even quarter, or three months, made possible by today’s open source Cloud environment and API economy.

All you need is a reasonably technical entrepreneur and an ace developer who can stitch a few RESTFUL API’s together in a MEAN stack, add a splashy UI Angular and a database at the cost of a few thousand carefully squirreled away dollars.

With the MVP in hand the game now changes to getting access to venture capital. Which is why our mythical startup has probably worked at an Incubator and almost certainly applied to an Accelerator like Y Combinator or Techstars.

Burn-rate meats often impossible dreams, and few survive the first year of the brutal startup world.

At the hackathon we see the same process, although here it has been compressed from months into hours. The process is the same though, with the team scouting out the lay of the land, looking for sponsors with the biggest prices and the best APIs. Then one team member peals off with cURL or Postman to exercise the APIs and see how useful they are.

The same web frameworks that are used in the startup community are used almost without changed at the hackathons.

At the hackathon, the VC from the startup world is represented by the judges and the sponsors rolled into one. So there is no need to go prospecting for money. Although VCs sometimes also participate as sponsors in some of the hackathons, at least in Silicon Valley and probably elsewhere.

And odd as it may seem, the hackathon model has one advantage over the startup world. And that is that labor is free so many teams have the maximum of members that the rules allow. You get free food and can sleep on the floor, at least for 24–36 hours this isn’t bad.

So to create an MVP in 24 to 36 hours with today’s Cloud and overabundance of open source programming tools is not as impossible as it may appear at first sight.

So why don’t more hackathons produce startup companies?

The main reason is probably that that is not what the hackathons typically focus on. The unspoken rule is that the organizer typically wants to get a set of RESTful APIs tested and is ready to pay for the testing with prizes.

The participants are usually largely students whose often impromptu teams only last as long as a typical college one-night stand. No thought of a longer commitment. Yes, they reply to our questions if they are going to keep developing their great app. But then reality sets in and other priorities, like school, take over.

And to take the hackathon MVP further does require some sort of money. And for students that is usually impossible to find.

And although hackathon teams typically are ace coders and problem solvers they usually don’t have an entrepreneurs view of how to parlay a Hackathon MVP into a fledgling company.

And the hackathon does not offer the kind of services that Accelerators offer. Where to turn for help?

Having said that, hackathons are a fabulous way to foster innovation and entrepreneurship among the very young. And as the Cloud, Open Source and API economy mature we can expect to see more hackathon MVP become springboards to startup companies.

Written by

Developers, startups and hackathons, Cloud, AI and Blockchain, up and down Silicon Valley.

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