5 tips for winning a FinTech hackathon
Disclaimer: Before I start, I should caveat that our team (Koodoo), was one of the winners at the inaugural ClearScore hackathon. Huge kudos to teams Certua and Chetwood for their 1st and 2nd places respectively, great ideas both and well deserved! Our team was very happy with a 3rd place out of the 12 participating teams. So we were one of the winners…
Intro
Koodoo (my team) received an invitation to participate in ClearScore’s inaugural hackathon on 11th and 12th July as part of their 4th birthday party event. At Koodoo, we love a good hackathon, we love working with everyone at ClearScore and we fancied our chances at winning - so we decided to put in a team.
The brief was simple: Create a prototype of a new product, service or tool based on ClearScore data, our APIs and any other datasets out there.
After much furious hacking, playing table tennis and beer-drinking, we presented our pitch and were delighted to win 3rd place out of the 12 teams.
So, what did we learn, and what did we think were some of the key components to our (relative!) success?
Tip 1: Preparing is most definitely not cheating (I think..)
24 hours to prepare, build, test and present a MVP product is damn hard. The last thing you want to be doing during those precious 24 hours is debating what you’re going to build.
2 days before the hackathon we got together as a team and threw some product ideas on the whiteboard. We voted on our favourites based on value, feasibility and fun, and created a prioritised shortlist. We came to the hackathon with a clear 1st choice idea, and agreed that if it proved unfeasible, we’d move onto idea number 2, and then onto idea number 3 and so on.
Tip 2: Try to predict the scoring criteria
All good hackathons will have a judging panel that will use a scoring framework (e.g. 20 points for quality of product, 20 points for the pitch, 20 points for commercial viability).
While you probably won’t get an answer on exactly how the scoring framework is weighted, if you get to know the business running the hackathon (and therefore judging it), you might be able to take some sensible guesses.
For example, we know that ClearScore have recently been making a big push to improve the well-being of their users and employees alike. Justin Basini (their CEO) has recently been on the news talking about this, and we figured that any way of linking the hackathon idea to something that the CEO cares deeply about is going to be well received.
Tip 3: Aim for an 8-hour MVP
Do not plan to deliver your MVP with 20 minutes to go. It’s just not worth the inevitable stress that will cause. That extra animation that your MVP simply couldn’t live without is not going to make the difference between winning and losing.
In our case, we managed an 8-hour MVP. By 8pm we had done an internal demo of a product journey that was passable, but didn’t have test cases or any of the extra bells and whistles. At 8.30pm we went to the pub and had a celebratory drink before getting back to work on improving our MVP. And yes, we also played a lot of table tennis.
Tip 4: Have a bit of fun
Humour goes a long way. Have fun during the hackathon, and if you’re feeling confident, try to infuse some of that humour into the product and pitch itself! Nobody is planning on taking the hackathon idea directly to market, so it doesn’t need to be super-polished and on brand.
The name of ClearScore’s 4th birthday event was ‘One:You’ (logo below).
So, in the spirit of originality, we branded our product ‘One:Ewe’, and didn’t miss a single opportunity to ram in a terrible sheep pun into our pitch (video below).
Tip 5: Your pitch is everything; don’t leave it to chance
You have a 5 minute pitch to score as many points as possible, and the only way to “ship” your beautiful product to the judging panel is through the live demo in your pitch. Anything you don’t show in the pitch will not get counted towards your score.
This was my biggest personal takeaway. Because my team were so awesome at building the product during the hackathon, I had lots of time to carefully plan out the 5 minute pitch. I started working on a pitch skeleton at 7pm, and quickly realised two things:
- The exact requirements for the two test scenarios I was going to demo in the pitch
- That the team didn’t need to test or create scenarios for any more than those cases, as they wouldn’t get shown in the pitch
By 9am the next morning, the whole team had seen me present the pitch to them, understood what was being demoed and what wasn’t, had redundancy plans for the inevitable tech failure during a live demo, and gave me loads of constructive feedback for making the pitch better. I then had 3 hours to keep talking through it like a lunatic to the amusement of others around me.
A few more words
- Firstly, a huge thank you to the legendary team at ClearScore for organising and running the hackathon. It was definitely the best organised and executed one I’ve ever been to.
- Secondly, thank you to the amazing Koodoo team. You’re all brilliant and this result is 100% down to your smarts and passion. Zac Braddy Aran Bruce-Caddick Kojo Hinson et al
- This is a PM’s view — there were so many other contributing factors to us doing well. As a shout out to our team but also to the Medium community — what have I missed?
- Finally, here’s the video of our pitch (sorry about the low fidelity..)! And if you steal our idea and make a fortune out of it, please don’t forget to give us a clap or two.
