How to gain a second prize at a 48h hackaton spending only 10h on coding?

In other words: how to hack a hackaton
Story about Cookie Vario and our work during AGHacks 2015.

Me and my closest collaborator — Kacper — have participated in hackatons before. We even had a brilliant idea once, but failed completely (You can read how to fail here).

We have also had ideas with no practical application at all — like building a printer out of some wood, stepper motor, servos and arduino and adding web interface for drawing contoured shapes. We’ve had fun, suprising everybody with usage of drill and saw.

This time we had totally new approach. Three days before the hackaton Kacper told me that we could build a variometer for paragliders, as he couldn’t afford ones currently available on the market. It is a device that tells a paraglider whether he is moving vertically up or down by appropiate beeping.
As it sounded quite easy he suggested that we could additionally prepare a business plan, if we’ve found someone that could estimate costs of a bulk production. It seemed to be a good idea, different that the previous ones. But after an hour of discussing the problem we’ve decided that we will go one step further — create a complete product, a brand and a crowdfunding campaign.

Idea number one: Focus on the MVP.
When the hackaton started we focused on developing the MVP as quick as possible. Literally, after less than ten hours of coding we had a prototype that we’ve tested as a breadboard wrapped in bubble foil throwing it up and down the entresol and math model only to be transferred from matlab code into the device.

Idea number two: Be visible. From the beginning of the hackaton we tried to be as visible as possible. We chosen a table close to the stage and located at the edge — so people could approach us easily. We also placed a large kanban next to us, it was useful to handle task organisation and it was a perfect conversation starter at the same time. Especially with Allegro.tech mentors, as they also use kanban in their company.
What might sound quite funny and flippant — also my cat-alike scarf was a great icebreaker. I had it on my neck almost all the time and not only it brings me luck, but starting to talk about the cat on my neck easily leaded to conversation about our project, a bunch of times.

Idea number three: Build a brand.

When we had a working prototype we’ve focused on building a brand and a product. We were sure that our prototype wrapped in bubble foil will not amaze anybody. So we needed something nice — I started designing in OpenSCAD. Luckily we have friends in 3D printing industry (3DFly thank you once again!), so after a quick facebook chat I have sent my design for printing.
We designed our logo, consulting it with Krzysztof Bogomaz from whom we’ve learned a lot about brand creation. When we decided final version of the logo, we quickly designed biusiness cards, stickers, we even had a badge with our logo. Luckily for us there is a printing shop in Krakow available 24/7, this city never sleeps!
In meantime we recorded some footage to be used in our kickstarter campaign video. Initially we planned to end all work till the second night and go to sleep. But we finally didn’t sleep at all. We created also a webpage, facebook page, bought a cookievario.com domain…

Idea : Sell it!
We ended somewhere around four or five AM on sunday. We cleaned our workspace, we’ve „printed” a QR Code manually crossing out the squares with a marker (it worked!), and generally prepared our stand — with a place for the device, biz cards, laptop with our video, a paragliding helmet… And started waiting for 9AM — the time the work was to be ended and possible time for people to come and ask about our project. And yes — they come. The people’s reactions were the most cheering thing after two days without sleeping. We’ve been repeating the same thing over and over again and every time get a positive reaction. Some people were like ‘wow, you serious, all of that during these 48h?!’, some like ‘and you’re a participants, we thought you’re a company already selling this or so’. The only person who showed his skepticism was Marek Kapturkiewicz, asking us if we have asked more than one possible user if the product was good. And we respect him for that as he is a co-founder of Innovation Nest, a Venture Capital — he suggested us a place to start further work. This outwardly boring repetition had in fact a very positive effect. I have repeated the same routine maybe fifty times, kind of pitching the product to every person who came by. As an effect the main pitch went quite good withouth any additional preparation.
Our target was to reach the 15 best teams chosen to be able to pitch — this was a success for us already. But the jury appreciated our work so we got the second prize — making these sleepless 48 hours worth the effort even more.

What we could do better?
I am not a big follower of the idea that it is necessary to precisely analyse all that’s been done and thorougly search for aspects that need to be improved. We gave our best and that’s all. However you’re more than welcome to leave your feedback — I’d be ultimately happy to hear how other people perceive our approach and work! Feel free to comment, contact us and so on.