How to win your first Hackathon

Rakshit Shukla
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read
Credit: Hero Images/Getty

Last weekend I got an opportunity to judge some amazing projects at Hack The 6ix: 2018. This was Toronto’s largest summer hackathon and was hosted at Top Hat’s office in downtown Toronto.

We had over 400 registered hackers and after 36 hours of hacking, there were ~64 final submissions ready for judging. Overall, the event was very successful and thanks to all the teams that participated 👏

Following the event, I wanted to share my thoughts on how teams can optimize their chances of winning from the lens of a judge.

Generally, the judges at hackathons have a limited time to evaluate dozens of hacks and score them as per criteria. Given this, each team should have a goal to impress the judges and score well in the criteria set.

Below I’ve outlined some steps that can be used as a systematic blueprint for your upcoming hackathon. Give it a try and please let me know how it goes!


Step 1: Exploration

What’s the theme of the hackathon?
What’s the judging criteria?
Who are the judges and sponsors?
Are any hardware devices available for use?
Who are the other participants looking to form teams?

Answers to some of these questions will assist you in getting started and identifying a high level domain area to work with.
At many hackathons, the organizers and volunteers are available to help teams get started, so make the most out of this. If not, consider checking out websites like Devpost for additional information and finding fellow participants you might want to team up with.

As a simple example, if the theme of the event is “Health and Fitness”, hardware hacks using the Fitbit/Myo armbands could be possible options and you could team up with other developers who wish to work with these hardware devices.

Lastly, knowing the judging criteria is very important for improving your chances of winning. Pay close attention to it and divide up work appropriately within the team.

Step 2: The ‘Wow’ factor

Once you‘re past the exploration stage and have teamed up, the objective is to think of building a hack that will grab the judges’ attention.
It has to be impressive enough to make the judges go “Gosh! I wonder how they did that?”

Here’s the thing, mobile apps were cool in 2010. Eight years later, most of us have already seen apps that help with food delivery, dating, monitoring GPS location etc.. Consider researching new technologies that have been getting attention: Augmented Reality? Blockchain? What’s next?

Note: If your team is falling short on technical expertise, worry not!
Give your project a different taste by doing something clever.
Is it the world cup season? Adding a topical flavor to your hack will surely get you “creativity” points 👍

These are all tools in your toolkit. Use them to your advantage as needed.

Step 3: Focus

Alright great, time to get hacking. The most important part here is to focus on the core use case. Keep it simple and skip building all the extraneous things like login/registration workflows or UI customizations.

The idea is to keep it simple and execute it well. If your team encounters a situation: “Let’s also build ___”, it means you’re diverging from the original solution.
Simplicity is the key to resonating well with the judges. If your team doesn’t focus, it gets harder to explain what your hack’s purpose is.
Given the limited time judges have to score your hack, complex use cases could do more harm than good.

Step 4: Pitch

Alright, so your team has coded the night away and its time to pitch your demo! Take time to practice the pitch.

Let’s see how a hypothetical hack could be pitched in two ways:
Pitch A: “We’ve built a mobile app that tracks your GPS location in the background. It then syncs prices from the menus of local restaurants around your current location and stores it in our database. Once that’s done, it will deduct the prices from the menu based on your distance…”
Judge: Looking at their watch: “So what exactly does the app do?” 🤔

Pitch B: “We’ve built a mobile app that gives you daily discounts on nearby restaurants the more you walk by them!”
Judge: “Oh wow, How are you doing that?” 😲

See how smooth Pitch B was in comparison?
All your valuable coding effort needs to be relayed effectively at the end. I would recommend keeping your pitch simple and practicing it several times.


Hopefully this provides some guidance to anyone looking to get their hands on the 🥇
Lastly, remember hackathons are meant to be fun, so don’t get too stressed about winning! Enjoy your time there and make the most of your experience.

A big thanks to the organizers and volunteers at Hack the 6ix for all the great work and giving me an opportunity to be part of the event.

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