From Competing at Hackathons to Actually Making a Start-up
So I’m sitting inside our startup’s office at NextSpace with my friends/cofounders and I’m wondering: how we got here? I’m not talking about physically, we uber everywhere, I mean this point.
The Where
It can all be traced back to the bus ride where we met, on our way to SD Hacks. Everyone got on the bus and after we settled down, I look at the seat across from me and notice a guy wearing a Hack the North shirt. I asked him how it was and he said it was his best hackathon experience so far. We ended up talking the whole way there about our past and current projects.
The Why
Why were we going to a hackathon though? Who in their right mind would want to spend 24+ hours coding with: unfamiliar technologies like APIs, little to no sleeping arrangements, and more often than not sketchy wi-fi. Well once you win at one, it gets pretty addicting.
SD Hacks
Who would’ve known that I’d meet my now good friend and startup partner at a hackathon we ended up volunteering at instead of competing. Where we learned how to start, operate and man 3D printers, and did so for 8+ hours. Afterwards we were kind of burned out so we crashed at the dorms, checked out the sponsor booths, then explored the city. This was the only hackathon neither of us have ever attended and not submitted to. Yet, it’s how we started becoming partners, so it definitely was a worthwhile experience.
HackingEDU
As a group we all decided to go to HackingEDU. Unfortunately, none of us had any idea of what we’d like to make at all. We eventually went to a house to relax and get some rest, where we decided to go for the social good category. It was there that we identified two main problems, people are lazy and people are cheap. How could we make the process easier and make the cost of helping cheaper? Well we had the novel idea of making the process automatic and essentially free. Inspired by Acorn we decided to do a purchase based approach, where after each transaction and additional one would be made rounding the previous to the nearest dollar and donating to the cause of the user’s choice. This could be customized to instead make a lump sum transaction at different time intervals or to set a max amount donated, the default is set to the annual claimable tax amount for charity (how we made it “free”). We were lucky enough to win and realized that we all really enjoyed working together.
HackMerced
We all avidly attended and participated at various hackathons so we committed to throwing our own. It was UC Merced’s first ever hackathon and although it went well, no one saw the struggle it took to: secure funding, reserve the venue, get wifi, find volunteers, coordinate with vendors/speakers and get swag. //not to mention actually host the event
DataStack
It was only a matter of time that we’d all eventually work on our startup together. DataStack is a business intelligence tool that visualizes data that is passed through API’s. Check out our platform on our website to learn more.
The Question
So… how did we go from these events to this summer?
The How
Well we’ve both had a couple internships, freelance jobs, as well as personal projects. And it taught us a lot. Most importantly that we’d much rather work with people, than for anyone. And as for how our summer is going, you’ll have to wait for the next post and see.
