Make Hackathons Great Again
The term “hackathon” doesn’t have the same luster as it once did. Depending on who you ask about a joining a hackathon, you’ll usually end up with one of the following answers:
- Awesome, I’ve been looking for a reason to try <insert some technology here or figure out x problem>
- Meh.
Not all hackathons produce yet-another-bar-drink-special-app or a social network for puppies. GroupMe, Timehop and PhoneGap are examples of the rare outcomes that can come from hackathons. More often then not, projects from hackathons atrophy to the abyss of untouched projects. Take participant disappointment and add large cash prizes that large corporations offer as bounty and multiply that with the few number of hackathons a year and you have a formula that equals an environment that feels like a j-o-b.
Focus on creating value
ABODO graduated from Gener8tor in 2013. Since then, over 30 companies have graduated and joined the now 14th-best ranked start-up accelerator in the U.S. One benefit of an accelerator program is the ability to tap into it’s alumni network. Our idea was to see if we could drive innovation by leveraging different skill sets of other portfolio companies. We thought a hackathon could possibly accomplish this and if it didn’t, we’d still have a lot of fun trying.
In order for a start-up to innovate, the company must consistently be willing to experiment with new technologies and processes to change the status quo. That’s what we attempted to do with the hackathon format. We tried it and we’re excited to share the outcome.
The Format
Each company submits ideas and problems in their space. Each company is it’s own team and can hack on anything except their own submissions. The idea is to use the technical strengths of each company to innovate and to create things from a different perspective.
Rules:
- You can’t pick your own idea
- There will be no assigned ideas to teams. If everyone picks the same idea to work on, so be it. Forcing teams to work on something they don’t want to work on kind of defeats the purpose, so make sure your app submissions sound appealing enough. Not sales-y, remember you’re dealing with mostly devs. This is not about direct competition, but friendly innovation.
- This is open to anyone at your organization. Product/Ops/Marketing/Sales can join in and spark innovation and team building. They could even hack a mock launch site while others create the product.
- No Jerks
Reminder of a few benefits:
- Team building — working on something together that puts everyone out of their comfort zone
- Opportunity for the team to try a different technology or stack — Write something in GO, or try React.
- Innovation and prototyping. This will give an opportunity for an idea you have to be prototyped.
Criteria behind the format
Knowing that time is not a luxury at a start-up, we looked to optimize the format of the hackathon to generate the most value. Here is what we came up with:
You already have a great hackathon team
Each participating company would be it’s own hackathon team. Your engineering team already performs well together. Why not keep them together to maximize value.
Pressure to deliver
The focus is entirely different. You’re working to prototype and create value for another team who might use this. It forces teams to spend time brainstorming what would be the best for an existing company, not a company that would be created after the hackathon.
Leverage different skill sets
Portfolio companies have different skill sets that fit their space. Create value by leveraging other companies specialties like Big Data, Mobile etc.
An invite only hackathon
We wanted to start small. Instead of inviting every portfolio company we wanted to validate the idea.
The outcome
Here are some of the hacks that went down:
Crime Score
The folks over at Beekeeper Data took on the challenge of trying to validate sourcing crime data and display it on a map. They had to find where they could source quality data and how to display it that made sense to a user. The final demo was fully interactive, as you zoomed in, the areas on the map became more refined. They even came up with a key legend and icons to identify specific reported incidents in an area.
Creating a Slack bot
The ABODO team took on the challenge of creating a Slack bot that could be used in an asynchronous workflow. The final demo was a bot named Violet, that can run any job via commands. The jobs executed via web-hooks and had an API to hook back into for completion of asynchronous jobs. In addition, the team used D3.js and phantomjs to generate the charts via-command line which could then be brought back into Slack.
Lessons Learned
Domain knowledge
The companies that participated knew each other pretty well. This will not be the case for future hackathons. Plan on having a 5–10 minute presentation of each company to inform the other teams in domain knowledge.
Design roles
If the ideas pitched do not contain areas where design is needed, have the designers get together on their own team to prototype something else and have them float around when needed.
Thank you to our sponsors
I want to thank Gener8tor for providing the space for the hackathon as well as providing lunch and dinner. Thank you to Cadence Cold Brew for donating growlers of cold brew coffee to keep us caffeinated!
It’s gonna be yuuge
We plan on opening up this format by inviting more companies. We’ve proven and validated the concept and we can’t wait to see what kind of innovation and value it can generate at a larger scale, but most importantly — “Make Hackathons Great Again!”
