How not to win a hackathon and build a great product at the same time? (Part 6)
The Nokia people loved the idea, the implementation and the brand, too.
We were told that they had been working on something similar currently. So, we were quite sure that we would win SOMETHING…
The final stage of the hackathon on Sunday morning was to pitch our projects to the other participants and the companies.
We split into two:
- Zsófi and Ádám were pitching our project untiringly and zealously,
- the three of us (Panna, Balázs and me) went around and checked the other teams’ projects and evaluated them. Our job was to compare two projects defined by a random generator and decide which one was better. We had to do some rounds of this process. Actually, it was not easy because it happened that we had to compare a cancer analyser with a VR project for international money transfer… how could you choose between them and still sleep at night?
The future seemed so bright. We saw some awesome projects but ours looked still in competition.
And there have been a lot of benefits so far:
We got to know each other more ✔️
We had the chance to talk to colleagues that we were not that close to ✔️
We built an amazing product ✔️
We made a great team ✔️
We did our best ✔️
…aaaand the closing ceremony came. After the speech the winners would have to demo their projects in front of the whole audience, and we were so ready for that.
At the beginning of the event we were still wondering how we would be able to demo our work, if we didn’t bring our computers into the room. Finally, it turned out that the teams who had won took their computers with them because they were told previously that they had to…
Winners of all categories had been announced — and none of them were us.
At the end they announced the winner of the public vote, and guess what, the concept of the winner project was the exact same as ours! Seeing their demo, we were sure that our product worked waaaay better than the one they presented.
We had mixed feelings …their project was not as cool as ours. And our team was better, too. So, altogether we definitely deserved the prize more than them, am I right?
Very-very soon we started to feel all the fatigue of the world. At least I did. And disappointment, too.
The closing ceremony ended and we started to leave the room to go back to our normal, everyday life… but there was one more thing! The Nokia guy from the R&D department ran after Zsófi and told her that he still wanted to cooperate with us and he truly wanted us to win, but some of his colleagues decided against. He handed over his namecard and made her promise that we would contact him in the following days.
Since then we’ve exchanged a couple of emails and had a video conference, too. The project he was briefing us about looked really promising.
So, I don’t know what the future holds but it can be a beginning of a beautiful partnership!
- Part 1: https://medium.com/@saroltatrk/how-not-to-win-a-hackathon-and-build-a-great-product-at-the-same-time-part-1-834c2fc6e7fe
- Part 2: https://medium.com/@saroltatrk/how-not-to-win-a-hackathon-and-build-a-great-product-at-the-same-time-part-2-3e36570953ba
- Part 3: https://medium.com/@saroltatrk/how-not-to-win-a-hackathon-and-build-a-great-product-at-the-same-time-part-3-84b556540cc6
- Part 4: https://medium.com/@saroltatrk/how-not-to-win-a-hackathon-and-build-a-great-product-at-the-same-time-part-4-4d1556f289c
- Part 5: https://medium.com/@saroltatrk/how-not-to-win-a-hackathon-and-build-a-great-product-at-the-same-time-part-5-fc7d37aadd55