How to get the Perfect Hackathon Pitch: Advice from Macaron, Winner of the nwHacks 2021 Perfect Pitch Prize
While hackathons are a lot more than winning a prize, it’s definitely an awesome feeling to win a prize on a project you’ve worked so hard on. With that being said, let’s hear some advice from a prize winning hackathon team!
Winner of the best pitch award for nwHacks 2021, Macaron, is an application that allows a user to get news information in a very bite-sized package using NLP! Just like how a Macaron is easy to digest and quick to eat, this application allows users to quickly digest small bits of news.
So let’s see some tips the team has about making a winning pitch and the process behind Macaron!
Q: So what was one of the challenges in creating a project that was able to catch the eyes of judges? And how would you overcome those challenges?
A: While being remote has been viewed as a disadvantage, it’s also an advantage too! Being remote doesn’t constrain you from doing a live pitch, which means you use cooler video techniques and use a lot of editing techniques. This made our pitch stand out, which we thought was a really important part of our project. Especially in a remote environment, it’s really important to stand out. Unfortunately, what most teams end up doing is making their pitch at the end of their project, and this is when they are super burnt out. So what they end up doing is recording their screens while reading something like a monologue.
But you want to show off your cool product! And that’s why we think it’s really important to get a pitch going pretty much as soon as you start developing the projects. We would say making the presentation is as important or even more than the actual product. A lot of people may assume that if their product is cool, that will be enough to stand out, but if your pitch is monotone, that’s the first impression people will get of your product. That’s not very interesting to the judge, so instead, you will want to tell a story with your pitch.
Q: What are the steps teams should take to create an awesome pitch? And what are some pitfalls teams may find themselves in while creating a pitch?
A: Number one is to start early on the pitch. If your team puts aside the pitch till the end when the product is finished, they are gonna be really tired and won’t have the capacity to make a pitch that stands out.
Next, make a pitch so that it tells a story. You don’t want to sound like SparkNotes, right? You don’t want to sound like you’re just going through a bullet after bullet point of what your product is like. You know you want to kind of tell the story of what the problem was, why you made it. Do you know how this is good? Like how this is important, you know and why this is cool and you kind of want to like flow.
If you want to have a really fun product, then you should make a really funny pitch. If you wanna make a really serious and professional product, then you should make a really calm and collected pitch.
Additionally, we believe that we had such a coherent project in the end, both as a product and with a pitch, because we had a very clear vision set out right from the get-go.
By effectively and consistently communicating we had the same shared vision in mind, and so that you know, while we’re moving forward, whether it’s by creating the product or it’s trying to market the product with the pitch and the idea, you know we have all the goals and the big picture in mind. You know who our target audience is, what the purpose of our product is.
Additionally, since we start the pitch off early, we can work on the pitch and product in parallel. We aren’t constrained. Last second scrambling trying to overshoot, we didn’t think about this idea or we don’t have enough time to have a good presentation, is never good
Q: How do you go about ideation?
A: Technology is not the number one thing we think about; it’s secondary. We want to help solve this issue where you just want to get news and you want to understand the news and you want to be able to help the world. Essentially, our main idea was focused on social good. We find a problem we wanted to solve first, and then from that, we actually start to then build the technical part of things.
We have a clear direction and that way you know we’re not caught up with a product that is technically sophisticated, perhaps using some really cool technology, but is completely unmarketable or something that’s just shooting for the moon, but then you know you don’t have the know-how or the resources to really back up that trajectory or that projection you want to go to.
Q: How do you utilize different mindsets to create an awesome product and an outstanding pitch?
Sometimes, the actual project and the presentation don’t actually line up. For instance, this project is marketable, and this idea is cool. But is this project something we can actually make? Would it make sense to the judges? Is this a functional idea? This is what people with a business mindset do; keep people realistic and think about what’s actually marketable.
But the more technical-minded people are also important. If the business-minded individuals wanted an AI that can do everything built in 30 minutes, that’s obviously unrealistic for the technical people to accomplish.
Also, contrary to popular belief, a really presentable product doesn’t have to fully work. Hackathons are all about the idea, and if you have a presentable idea then you’re set; this requires both technical people and business people working together to achieve this.
At the end of the day, good communication is, you know, it’s a cliche thing to say, but at the end of the day, that is what brings it all together. It’s communication that really matters. If you keep talking to each other as the product is being developed, then you don’t need to worry about anything misaligning. You just gotta keep talking to each other.
Q: What’s your biggest takeaway from winning?
A: A lot of the opinions that I shared with you today are from perspectives I got from doing this project. A big takeaway I got from this project is learning about communication and cooperation, and definitely getting things done on a tight deadline while working with someone else with different skill sets. These are all very important things that I think you know.
Having gone through the hackathon, you’re put on a tight schedule and you’re working on this project. You really learn a lot of things related to getting something done. Working together, cooperating, communicating, working on a deadline, and on a fairly tight schedule with perhaps pretty ambitious goals in mind, and then at the same time, you’re also learning. How do I? How do I make those goals a reality? What technologies can I use? What shortcuts? Do I maybe need to take or things I need to cut out? How do we prioritize my tasks? And that has helped us in many future hackathons or our own personal projects. Learning about new technology as well.
Additionally, you learn a lot of things that school doesn’t teach you; like hosting your project up so you can share it and get it out to the world; this has been a huge help for our own, personal endeavors or things that we want to do to get our projects noticed too.
You get to actually look behind the scenes, you know behind the URL that you just type in the web address; you now know the technologies behind that simple URL.
Check out their Devpost here: https://devpost.com/software/macaron
Learn more about the team here:
Jaemin:
Nicholas:
