Hashink: The Origin Story
A Chilean, a Spaniard, and two Americans walk into a hackathon… and the rest is history.
TL;DR: We formed a killer team, developed our first iteration, presented at EthGlobal NFT hackathon, and came away victorious. What’s next? Taking on Tom Brady.
Forget chronological stories, here’s the pitch video that got us to the finals:
A month earlier…
/light bulb moment
I read a comment on Reddit about autographing an NFT, and thought, “this guy is a genius!”. Turns out, I misread the comment but it was too late, there was no turning back and the idea started to take up more of my time.
I did a quick google search and — there must be a mistake. No one’s done this before‽
Where can I test this idea and build this thing?
It was probably a sign of Flying Spaghetti Monster that while doing my due diligence I fumbled upon EthGlobal’s NFTHack.
NFT… hack.
Too perfect.
3 weeks earlier…
It’s easy to get lost in a hackathon. I’ve been to some in the past which I didn’t prepare at all, and I ended up just watching because like everything in life, you gotta prepare or else.
I decided to get the best talent the Hack could offer, and put together a killer team as soon as possible so we could plan ahead.
ETHGlobal has a Team Formation google slide where you make a slide and push your project/profile to get people to apply for it/recruited into a team. As you can see below, the base slide for promoting your project is fugly and bland, but I had a few tricks up my sleeve.:
I wasn’t falling into that trap. After I wrote my text, I wanted as many people to look at it as possible.
Time for some Bling Bling:
It wasn’t hard to get noticed at that point:
The project started to get noticed at that point:
The team
Brennan, an absolute monster front-end web3 developer contacted me first. My lucky day — this guy knows what’s going on, he’s been to/won several EthGlobal hackathons in the past, is a crucial part of the development process, and loves the idea. I welcomed him with open arms.
Justin messaged me a few days later…
Reasons why Startups fail generally involve the business model and market. I’m clueless about Hollywood and its inner workings and we needed someone with real-world experience & industry knowledge. Shenk was our guy.
Pablo excused himself because he had only learned about solidity 6 months earlier (if you knew how nice this guy is, you’d understand why he intro’d himself like this). Little did he know six months in crypto and you’re a guru. But to be honest, we wanted him for his 14 years of past professional experience which is what counts.
Also, part of the hackathon experience is onboarding newcomers, so we were all glad to have him on the team.
We planned and organized as much as we could. What each person would do during the hack, backlog, and all.
A fifth member joined our team and dropped out of the hackathon on the first day of the hackathon due to an illness. Not a great start.
48 hours earlier…
BAM! Hackathon started guns blazing!
We had to scramble to put out the fire of not having our backend developer with us, but once we dealt with that and removed a few features that’d be done by him, we got our hands dirty.
Pablo quickly got our first contracts on rinkeby, here’s a piece of history from that day:
CelebrityContract (0xAb4EA7F74f7EaeB739282497ec448FdBc93D2883)
AutographContract (0x0dA6dA70D9666dCF2B96493af83C4f256fB4E153)
AutographRequestContract (0xcB50cD0c169a0D5605BD7554E6Fd6D795ca34344)
I don’t know how, but Brennan took on the frontend and the pseudo-backend by himself and got a great product out for us in no time.
It even had dark mode…
Meanwhile, I made our application mockups, Justin went out and did market research and interviewed users and celebrities.
The next day, Justin and I dealt with the pitch & presentation. The usual, problem > solution > market > DEMO… you know the drill. We also rehearsed the pitch a gazillion times, and he rocked it. Good thing we had a professional actor doing our pitch, it added depth to the usual, monotone pitches.
Demo Day
The last day of the hackathon, whew… that was exhausting, fun, but exhausting.
It ended up being the most tiring day- we pitched our project about a dozen times. Twice for the general competition and ~8 more for the sponsor prizes we thought fit with our product (and some we weren’t so sure).
After a grueling 72 hours, we found out we were a top 10 finalist.
Awesome, so, when do we go pitch the finals? and Brennan explains:
Nope guys, this means we won.
The 10 finalist projects win the hackathon. That’s it, no more pitches.
We won! We won! We won!
Anyway, that’s the story of how this happened. Hope it can get some people excited to join more of these hackathons in the future and join the Hashink community on our Discord.
Super Bowl champ?
That’s right. Tom Brady has launched an NFT project. Is this the NFT top? who knows — anyway…
His project? Autographs on NFTs.
Jackpot for Hashink:
Idea validated.
Market validated.
Investor interest validated.
Celebrity interest validated.
This’ll be David vs Goliath of the autograph NFT space and we’re ready to take on the challenge. In fact, we sort of started already with our juvenile tweet storm: https://twitter.com/hashinkapp/status/1379814092106424320
(this is all in jest of course, Tom)
So what’s next?
Our project has since become more than just 48 hours of work.
As Aaron Caulfield put it in this podcast while interviewing Justin; we’ve been through the thought process of a 6-month-old startup since the hackathon.
All the questions founders have over the course of 6 months — it hits you in one day.
We’re currently looking to build a community that can help us build this idea.
We’re also looking for funding in the form of a seed investment in order to take this to the next level.
How can you help?
Join the Discord community: https://discord.gg/PRPYUHNZ
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashinkapp
Sign up for newsletter updates: https://hashink.app
Introduce us to investors: funding@hashink.app
Thanks for reading. We’re excited for what the future has in store!
