 Welcome to the session on 7 Tips for Winning at Hackathons. Before we get started, I just want to take an informal survey. We have a small group here which is nice. How many people work at a startup? Probably nobody. One person. What's your startup? It's called what? Channel Bridge. Okay. So what I'm going to do in this session is I'm going to talk about my own experience with starting a startup from a Hackathon. We won't get into how do you raise money and all the other kind of business things around it, but this session is more focused at the very beginning of a new venture that starts from a Hackathon. So we'll talk a little bit about what a Hackathon is, what should you do at a Hackathon, and most importantly, how do you win a Hackathon? I'm sure here in India, especially in Bangalore, they probably have a large number of Hackathons in the area. Is that right? It's probably one every week. I know in Atlanta where I live in the U.S., there's probably some kind of Hackathon every two weeks in the city. Atlanta is not a big city like Bangalore. It only has about 6 or 7 million people, but we have plenty of big companies and a lot of developers, so there's a lot of Hackathons. And the startup that I currently work at, which I'm a co-founder of, is called Triplingo. We started the company as a mobile application for travelers going to foreign countries and learning the language, learning the culture, and other things like that. Since we started the company five years ago, we've actually pivoted the company twice, believe it or not. So a lot of it has to do with what do you feel is the market fit for generating a product that can work well and obviously make money. So this is the screenshot from the original version about five years ago, both on iOS and Android. But we'll get into that in a little bit more detail in a bit. But again, my company is called Triplingo. We're in the corporate travel space. We originally started as a language learning company, culture learning. It was basically for people traveling to foreign countries, helped them learn the language, learned the culture, other things like that. We've added a ton of features. A lot of what we did along the way was understand what the market really wanted of a product when business and leisure travelers were going to a foreign country. And again, we pivoted twice, so we do things differently now, or we do different things now, but not really here to talk about Triplingo. I just wanted to give you a little bit of background so you understand where this comes from. So what's hackathon? Hackathon, obviously, is some kind of event where you go and hack. They typically vary in duration. So there are different types of hackathons nowadays. There are all sorts of different types of hackathons nowadays. When we first did our start of weekend hackathon about five years ago, there weren't a lot of hackathons. Most of them were focused on software. But now they have software hackathons, hardware hackathons, design, UX, all sorts of different things. So different types of hackathons, and also there are different formats for these hackathons. So you have software and hardware and other types of hackathons, but there are also different types of hackathons. So what we did at Triplingo is we went to a very specific event that they do all over the world called start of weekend. So this is a hackathon that starts on Friday and ends on Sunday, and the idea is that it's typically a software focused in some way. But then there are also corporate hackathons, like internal or extra net type of hackathons. These are hackathons with a very specific company that is sponsoring the hackathon, and they usually have some kind of theme around it. So for example, there was a corporate hackathon recently in Atlanta, which was by a company that does payment processing, and they sponsored a hackathon. They had a lot of money and stuff like that and prizes. But the idea is that you go and hack something around payment processing or financial technology or something like that. And then of course you probably heard of different types of vendor hackathons, like Salesforce or AT&T. So for example, Salesforce has a massive hackathon that they do every year in California where the grand prize is a million dollars. So that's plenty of money to start a company usually, unless you want to go buy a couple of Lamborghinis or Mercedes or something like that. But they have a huge hackathon, a million dollars worth of prize money that they give out. Sorry, I think the grand prize is a million dollars, and then they have smaller prizes which are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But anyways, these are different types of hackathons that you probably see. We'll talk in a little bit more detail about some of these in a few minutes if you guys are interested. But again, the purpose of the hackathon, for you at least, is you hack something, usually create a project from scratch. It depends on the type of hackathon. One thing to keep in mind when you're looking at participating in a hackathon, whether you're a developer, a designer or if you're a business person. So these hackathons are not necessarily exclusive just to developers or designers. They're also business people who obviously go to these hackathons and their goal in going to the hackathon is to participate and maybe lead a team or have somebody help build out their idea that they have. But in terms of the hackathon, the organizer's goal also comes into play quite a bit. So community hackathons like Startup Weekend are usually very freeform in terms of what you can do and basically they're kind of driven by the local startup community. And then we talked a little bit about the corporate hackathon. So for corporate hackathons, you have a specific company that's sponsoring it. They're putting up the prize and they're putting up the money to put on a hackathon. But they usually have a very specific goal and that is usually number one to get some ideas for some of the products that they may have, but usually a lot of it is for recruitment purposes. So you have all these, you know, you have 100 developers or 50 developers who show up to do this hackathon and hack on financial technology, let's say. So they have multiple goals. So you have to bear that in mind depending on, again, what your goal is at a hackathon, you have to understand what the organizer's goal is. And then of course we talked about the SaaS and the vendor hackathons like Salesforce. So Salesforce's goal in having this hackathon is to help push their platform forward. Salesforce is a massive platform that has lots of different plugins and lots of different things and lots of external products that also run on the hackathon, also run on their platform. So their goal for the hackathon is to help push forward, have new ideas, new products that are part of the hackathon. So typically a hackathon depends in length. It could be just an afternoon. I've been to a hackathon before. That's just an afternoon, right? It starts like 10 a.m. and then maybe goes to 5 or 6 p.m. The longer hackathons sometimes are like a start of weekend is, you know, a whole weekend starts on Friday and ends on Sunday. And I've also even seen hackathons that are a whole month. Obviously you don't work on something on site for a whole month, but it's kind of like a remote hackathon. So some people do these kinds of things as well. But typically with a hackathon, what I think of it is that you hack and it's a marathon. We'll get into the marathon part in just a minute. So depending on the type of hackathon you go to, so you have slightly different formats, but they generally tend to follow this recipe. They usually start with something like pitches. So people get up and say, hey, this is my idea. Come join my team. Have an idea to build an app to send messages to other people securely. Whatever it may be, right? Any kind of idea. This is typically where a lot of business type of people come up and say, hey, I've got this great idea. I need some folks to put together a team and build this this weekend and get this idea of the ground. Once the pitches are done, usually by some kind of selection process, pick maybe five or 10 or 15 teams depending on the size of the hackathon for who will continue and who will participate in that hackathon. Again, this also depends on what type of hackathon it is. If you go to a startup weekend or a community hackathon, there's usually an idea selection so that 50 people come up and say, hey, I've got this great idea and I need a team to put this together. It typically doesn't have 50 teams working through the weekend. It typically will only have 10 or 15 teams. From there, you form teams. You hack and at the very end of the hackathon, you do a final presentation explaining the business concept and also maybe doing a demo showing marketing plan, other things like that. It's relatively straightforward. For the hackathon that I did five years ago, this is us. This was our hackathon team and this is me here working on some mobile apps that we were going to demo as part of this hackathon. Again, the hackathon that we specifically participated in was called Startup Weekend. We had a very large team on the first evening, so this photograph was taken on the first night. We had approximately 14 people the first night on Friday night and by Saturday morning there were 10 people left and by Sunday there were about nine people left. People kind of just dropped off because it's a lot of commitment to give a whole weekend and especially work all night or late into the evening. Some of us didn't even go home for the weekend. We basically just slept on the floor. A lot of people did go home and come back. Again, it depends on the format of the hackathon and how time-compressed it is and things like that. Again, we're here to talk about what's your goal for the hackathon and how do you win a hackathon. For a lot of people, going to a hackathon, for them it's about let's win some money, let's get some prizes, let's get some fame. For me, when I went to this hackathon, my goal was to leave my corporate job and to do something much more interesting and basically get into this startup world. Five years ago the startup world was not as cool as it is now. Nowadays everyone wants to do a startup and it's the cool thing you have a friend who may work at a bank or something and he's like, I've got this great idea for a mobile app. So you probably all have friends like this if you're in the software world. So there are a lot of people interested in these kinds of things but for me, at least, I wasn't there necessarily to go and make friends or network or anything like that. My goal was to win the hackathon and to have something come out of it that would be kind of a stepping stone to be doing something full-time rather than what I was doing at the time which was in a big company as a corporate developer. So if your goal is winning, then you're in the right place. I can give you some tips and we'll talk about the specific things that we want to do. And again, you don't have to go to a hackathon just to win it. Maybe you just want to do it for entertainment or just to have some fun. You can learn some new technology. You can work with other people who are smart. You can make some new friends and connections do some networking and other things like that. But for me, going to a hackathon, the best possible outcome was to win the hackathon and also do a startup. Build a new business based on spending just a weekend vetting out an idea, having judges look at it, give you feedback and things like that. So the idea that we specifically did tripling at this hackathon was not my idea. It was somebody else's idea. When the person was pitching it, I immediately picked up on the fact that the guy who was pitching it, who's our business person, slash CEO, I immediately picked up on the fact that he'd done a lot of research into this. Normally when you give a pitch at a hackathon like this, you don't have slides or anything like that. You basically just walk up in front of the room in front of a podium again with no slides or anything and you just say this is my idea and you have exactly one minute to do this usually. And if you make the first cut, you get two minutes. So you have to be very keenly aware of somebody pitching an idea in terms of how they describe it, how well they're describing it, and how much research you think that they've done into this idea. There are a lot of people who go to the hackathon and say, well, I've got an idea to build this mobile app that does messaging because I think it'll be amazing. It'll be even better than WhatsApp and then they'll walk off. That's their basic idea. That's all very good. It's a great idea for building a mobile application to help foreigners when they go to foreign countries because 90% of foreigners who go to a place like China don't know the language. They don't understand the culture, et cetera, et cetera. Someone who pitches and gives a detailed explanation of what they want to do and they've thought about the market fit makes a huge difference in terms of your probability of success for a hackathon. So the first step is whether you're a designer, a developer, or a business person, you have to be prepared before you go to a hackathon. You have to do some work up front. And again, these seven tips are for if you want to win a hackathon. If you're just going for fun, who cares? You just show up. You don't have to expend any of your time into getting ready. But again, these seven tips are for how to win a hackathon. So being prepared means having a game plan. Understand what the hackathon has in terms of the format. And also, most importantly, what are the criteria to win and how will your team that you join meet them? And if you're presenting an idea, have mock-ups of the idea ready, and we'll talk about hit the ground running in just a second. But one of the things that the person who pitched the Triplingo idea had was he actually went and used... He did everything in PowerPoint or Vizio or something like that instead of using a tool like Volsomic to do mock-ups. But he had detailed mock-ups of 30 different screens for the specific product you wanted to build. So that helped us tremendously to start building the product very, very quickly and working on the design. So we were able to, because he'd already done all this work, we were able to hit the ground running. We didn't have to do mock-ups. We didn't have to kind of think about the product at too high a level. We could think of the product more at the lower level and say, okay, how do we make this UX better? How do we come up with the design for something like this? It's very important to hit the ground running. The other thing is that I went as a developer, right? So from the business point of view, our CEO had everything ready. He had mock-ups. He had a business plan, market projections, et cetera, et cetera. But as a developer, I got my laptop ready. I knew that when I joined a team, these were the two different kinds of things I could do. Number one was build a mobile app. The other thing I could do was basic web stuff, whether it was server-side, you know, whatever. So I kind of already had these technologies in mind. And I wasn't trying to learn something new. Because again, my goal was to win this hackathon. I didn't want to go there to learn how to do web development with Python and Django, something I don't know anything about. But I know Rails. I know Java. I know the technologies that I can build something with. And I knew them well. I had my laptop prepared with everything that I would possibly need to be able to either build a mobile app or to build a web application using some of the technologies I mentioned. So that's what it means to be prepared. I also have that mentality. Be mentally prepared. Get some sleep the week before. Get a lot of sleep the night before. And just kind of be mentally and physically prepared to be able to do this long marathon over the course of a weekend. So the second thing that was probably the most important was we spent quite a bit of time practicing the final pitch and presentation. I didn't spend much time doing this except for the demo. But we sat together as a team and we ran through our pitch and presentation for the final presentation at the end of the weekend would be. So if you're pitching the idea, and again, I didn't pitch the idea. I helped pitch it, but I did the demo and I helped pitch a little bit of it, but our main business person pitched the idea. And he practiced the pitch. And remember, we were working on the software and working on the pitch simultaneously. So as we came out with features in the software, we would take a screenshot, we would hand it over so that it could be included in the final presentation. So we kind of iterated over and over and over on these things during the course of the weekend. So he practiced the pitch, probably starting Sunday morning at around 8 or 9 a.m. The final presentations were to start at 5 p.m. He probably practiced this 10-slide pitch deck about 20 to 30 times. So that when he got up there, he didn't have to read his slides. He had everything memorized. So there's a lot that you could talk about in terms of your idea. So the hard part is not how do you fill up five minutes explaining your idea and demoing your product. The hard part is how do you take all this stuff that you've done over the weekend or this idea that you have and distill it into five minutes so that it appeals to the judges and they want to select your team and your idea to win the weekend. So the hard part is being very concise and being a very good presentation. I've been to hackathons before as a mentor where the team that won the only reason that they won their idea was kind of stupid to be honest with you, but the only reason that they won was the person who gave the pitch did an amazing job with the pitch. She really sold the idea to the judges. She gave a really polished presentation. Their idea was kind of crap, in my opinion, but they did such an amazing presentation that the judges just naturally gravitated to this team and to this idea and they ended up winning. It was a little bit... A lot of us who were there as mentors thought it was a little bit of a joke, but that's on the judges. We had nothing to do with that. So, again, spend a lot of time on the final presentation or whoever is doing that needs to spend a lot of time doing that. I don't think that it's possible if, for example, if you're a developer working on the design of the product that you're trying to build or you're writing the code for the product that you're trying to build, I don't think it is realistic for you to also give the final presentation because you just don't have time. So, if you're a developer and you want to be the business person and kind of bring everything together and you're the product owner, let's say, then you need to find somebody else to write the code. You can't do both, you can't spend this amount of time to really distill a presentation into something good and come up with the metrics and other things that you can put into it to make sure that everything works well and you give a nice presentation. So, the third tip is split into subteams. So, if I go back to this picture really quickly, we were actually split into subteams here. So, the three of us were working on the mobile app. These three people were working on the web application. So, my immediate idea was because we have such a large team and because we have eight developers on the team, let's not all focus on doing one thing. Right? Let's reduce the risk that we won't finish anything by having three or four of us work on a mobile app and three or four of us will work on the web application. Basically, we build the same application, one for mobile and one for web. The guys back here, this is our business person who owned the idea. This is our designer and these guys were working on marketing. When I say marketing, they are working on the pitch deck and marketing and other things. How do we market the product and what's the business fit and things like that. How do we help us have as much velocity as possible as we're working through the weekend. So, again, it just depends on your product. You always have to have one group of people working on the business plan, the marketing plan and the final presentation that you wish to pitch. Depending on what you're doing, web application, mobile application may have some server side component. If you're doing a big data hackathon, for example, some data analysis and machine learning and things like that. So we split into sub teams so that we all weren't working on the same thing. Generally, what actually ended up happening at our hackathon is that it was just me and another guy working on the mobile application. Okay? We had four people actually working on the web application but we kind of tried to build the same product in two different ways. One for mobile and one for web. You can do that on the size of your team. If you don't have that many people, obviously you can't do that but it does help to break into smaller teams and to be very focused on what it is you're trying to accomplish over the weekend. And I spoke about this already. Going to hackathon can be an interesting way to try to learn something. I know there are some hackathons which are specifically targeted around learning some new technology. And this is great if that is your goal to learn a new technology. But again, I went to this hackathon and another one that I did which we didn't win first place for but we won second place and we won some specific prizes for some of the stuff we built. But our goal was to win and our goal to win meant that we used technology we knew because you don't have time to learn a new technology. And to be honest with you, if you don't know some technology relentlessly for three days with sleep deprivation lots of coffee whatever, a lot of pressure is not the best way to learn a new technology. What's the best way to learn a new technology? What's that? Right, you have fresh mind and what do you do? What do you do when you want to learn a new technology? Do you kind of do it at work or like what's your store something out there, what do you do? Right, so the gentleman says have a quick tutorial start exploring it, look at the code write some code, you do it leisurely you do it at night after you've had dinner you have 30 minutes or an hour, right whatever it may be, you do it on the weekend when you're free, hey I want to learn some closure, I want to learn Python but I've never done that before, you take your time so you can slowly absorb something a hackathon is the opposite of that hackathon is relentless pressure over a small amount of time to do something so use the technology you know a high pressure environment like a hackathon is not a good place to learn something new, okay again use tools, languages and platforms that you can code fast with this is probably very important if you're on the development side of a hackathon, use stuff you know have everything ready on your laptop use as many libraries as you can so you don't have to write stuff yourself your focus should always be on building the specific product, it's not trying to write a library that's down here at the low level you want to operate at the high level and build something as quickly as possible and what we specifically used for this start of weekend is we used a tool that allowed us to very very quickly prototype a real mobile application so the specific tool doesn't really matter I can tell you if you're interested but the specific tool didn't matter what we didn't want to do is we didn't want to write stuff in objective C one of the things that we came up with almost immediately was to make a big splash during the final presentation let's build that same app write this again this kind of language learning traveler companion application let's build the same app for iOS and Android and let's demo it in the final presentation we thought that if we did that the judges would go holy crap an app on two platforms over a weekend again we're trying to impress the judges as much as possible so that they would give us points so that we would win so we used a very specific tool that allowed us to do cross platform development from the same code base but we chose that I already had that in my mind when I told the other guys that I was working with that hey let's do this they were on board with it immediately and we started building it right away and the last board on here is also very important if you get stuck on something spend a little bit of time trying to fix it when I say a little bit of time 5 minutes, 15 minutes a maximum of maybe 30 minutes again if you're the developer, your goal is to actually produce something it doesn't have to be perfect nobody expects you to go to a startup weekend or hackathon and produce a polished result like if you're building a mobile application they don't expect you to actually take that mobile app and push it to the app store of the weekend it just has to be good enough has to impress the judges and convey the idea that the product is trying to do so if you get stuck you move on it doesn't matter what you have to do to move on you cut corners and you just hack through it that's why it's called a hackathon you just hack through it and you move on as quickly as possible don't worry if something doesn't work you can always come back to it later if you have time come back and revisit it because you're working so quickly that you generally don't have time to come back and fix something unless it is very critical number 5 remember your goals right what are our goals here for a startup weekend you're building a business who are the users, what is the potential market size what's the revenue what does the product look like what is going to be an MVP how do we test the product we have to cover in a pitch deck at the end you also want to demo that you actually built something very important that you actually demo that hey we actually built something when you just come into this hackathon and just write some slides you're not going to win a hackathon like that yes you do have to have very good looking slides that convey the idea and you have to do a great presentation but if you don't actually show that you built something over the weekend all you've done is just and judges will pick up on that very quickly and you won't get many points so for startup weekend type of hackathon what are your goals these are your goals you're building a business for corporate or vendor hackathon what are the criteria to win and how many of these will you meet so there's another hackathon we did aside from the startup weekend maybe about a year later it was before a big startup competition there you go so they did like a Saturday Sunday hackathon started Saturday morning and ended on Sunday and only three of us entered this for my company and it wasn't a corporate or vendor hackathon it was just kind of a general hackathon like startup weekend but format was slightly different and you could bring your own idea as well but what we did is we built a companion application for our main app over that weekend which was essentially like a travel magazine hey you're going to India or you're going to Switzerland or wherever you could pull up this app we called it Triposaurus and it would give you like here the restaurants you should go eat at these are some of the sightseeing you could do and basically what we did is we aggregated data from the internet various different sources on the internet and we created this magazine that you could put on to your iPad and have all this content for the destination of the country you're going to right it's a very simple idea but we thought it was very powerful but what we actually wanted to get out of that weekend aside from putting prototyping this product right so our first goal was to prototype this product not something we do during our day job at our startup but something more that we wanted to kind of maybe extend and experiment with and while we were at the hackathon one of the sponsors of the hackathon was the weather channel or weather.com weather.com is a big company they're based in Atlanta and they basically they have a TV channel called Weather Channel in the US and they own weather.com where basically you go check the weather but they had a very specific reason for being at this hackathon they had this API that would expose weather data for like today and you know next week forecast but they also had historical weather data okay so what we did is we used their API we pulled in their data we wrote a very simple algorithm to go and compute what would most likely be the weather in a specific destination at a specific time of year so you open up this app that we built this iPad app during the hackathon you open it up and say I'm going to Switzerland in the middle of July so we go and pull in and specifically I'm going to Zurich so we go and pull in interesting things about Zurich we had an RSS feed for that we had an RSS or an API that we used to get like restaurant data and we integrated this weather channel API to go and predict what would most likely be the weather in the second week of July and we ended up winning first we basically ended up winning the weather channel prize which I don't remember what exactly it was I think it was like an Xbox and a 50 inch television or maybe it was $500 or something but we specifically targeted to win that prize by incorporating their API as the sponsor and there were a couple of other sponsors there as well that had very specific things that they wanted developers to work on what's your goal for the start of weekend if you're doing or for a hackathon start of weekend you're going to a corporate or vendor hackathon know what the rules are and know what the criteria are and again are the goals expressed or demonstrated in your final presentation so one of the key things that I've talked about is having a great presentation also demoing something that works doesn't have to be perfect but demoing some actual work that you did for a product that you built so it's very important to have those two things probably the third most important thing is having an awesome design when you're doing your presentation or when you're demoing the product that you have having an awesome design makes a huge difference yeah you could just build something really nice and just have like a plain web page and just use kind of standard markup and you know it doesn't look great but hey it works right unfortunately to impress the judges on that is not enough having a nice design with a logo layout colors makes a huge difference right what you have to do typically at these hackathons there will be designers that will be there and as a team lead or somebody on a team you have to go find a designer and say hey look I want you to join my team usually there are very few designers at these hackathons unless of course you're at the design hackathon but if you're at a start of weekend or one of these corporate hackathons there will be a lot of designers there so you have to find a designer as soon as possible and say hey come join our team and come help us do this and in fact at our start of weekend hackathon we had we had a designer it was this guy right here he's still with the company as our as our main designer and UX person and he was actually in line in front of me as I was checking into the hackathon and I said hey how's it going what do you do oh I'm a designer and immediately I said oh you're a designer whatever team I join I'm going to come find you later and you're going to help us do our design in fact what he did is he did the design for us and he also did the design for another team because again designers are commonly in short supply at a hackathon so you have to find one and grab one as quickly as possible and in fact the design that we use even today so this is our design and this is our distinctive logo that we have this was this whole thing he did on that start of weekend we're still using the same design and the same logo that you see here you can see if you have the app this is basically the icon we have very distinct brand coloring etc etc but he actually put all this together on Saturday morning at that hackathon ok we still use the same thing because we love the design very distinctive it gives us exactly what we're looking for in terms of brand recognition right so once you have a designer use the stuff in the demo and in the presentation so you have kind of a fluid arc from the stuff that you have in your powerpoint or keynote presentation deck along with the demonstration so when we built the mobile app what we did is we incorporated the exact colors that were also used in the presentation deck so everything looked polished from top to bottom it makes your team look professional it makes it look nice a lot of this is impressing the judges if it looks good it must be good right so number seven all these points are very important but throw a couple of stats at you when you go to a hackathon approximately half of the teams never finish anything they don't really finish a presentation deck they kind of just throw it together at the last minute they usually don't finish or even come close to finishing a demo right so what we did is we came up with aside from splitting into sub teams we came up with the schedule of when we wanted to hit major milestones when will the presentation be ready when will we have the demos ready when will the design be ready so that we can incorporate it into the presentation and when will the design be ready so we can incorporate it into whatever product we're building very important to have points where you communicate with everyone because one of the problems with breaking into sub teams obviously whenever you have different teams what's the first problem you have it doesn't matter if it's a hackathon or if it's your day job building something communication so what we did is we put milestones in place to say at 8am on Sunday morning we're going to go and check see where everyone's at at noon we're going to start incorporating the final design the colors the logos everything both into the presentation and into the software demonstration that we're putting together and I talked about this a bit earlier which was if you get stuck move on the reason for that is this bullet point right here if you get stuck just move on you don't have to tell them that you didn't finish this specific feature you can just highlight the things you did do it's better to have something to demonstrate than not have anything to demonstrate better to go up there with something that's slightly broken rather than something that doesn't work at all or is not even close to being completed right so our whole motif for the weekend was let's do an awesome presentation and let's make sure we have something really nice to demo sure all of it doesn't work who cares right we'll just highlight the stuff that we did finish right here's the product we're building it's an app travelers going to foreign countries here's some of the features that we're going to have in this app this is how we're going to sell it this is the price point this is the market reach oh and here's a demonstration here you can see these are the four slang phrases when you go to China or to France that you can use to say hello right here's some culture content right basically show that and demonstrate that in an application so all that is to say you have to have the big vision but you break down into smaller chunks so that you can demonstrate something you have to demo everything right so what we demonstrated was what we call our slang slider show the same phrase in four different slang levels for a specific country right we made that fun so what we did is we said if you're going to France there are four different ways to say hello right and we didn't we actually said it but we kind of demonstrated it by saying you know when you go to France in a foreign country you don't typically say hello how are you doing today what you say is hi or howdy right or what we did is we made an allegory and we said if you're in the US if you're in the south you might say hey y'all how's it going right or if you're you know in California you might say yo what's up dog or something like that right so we made it interesting and we made it funny and we demonstrated this both in English and in a foreign language right so our business person had already done the research for French so we already had these phrases right you could say in French which means hello how are you which is the formal or you can say I'm going to have trouble remembering this now or you can just try to remember exactly how you say what's up or hi right in French I think it's just salut thank you I should know this we support 25 languages so I can't remember all of them but anyways you get the idea right so we're able to demo something we're able to make it interesting and exciting for the judges and again we were able to actually demonstrate this thing I pulled up an iOS simulator and an Android simulator and showed the features that we finished on the screen on the projector over the course of the weekend right or stuff we worked on over the weekend we're able to demonstrate and actually show this and the other thing that we did to have extra splash is we installed the application on an actual Android device and an iOS device and said oh yeah these aren't just screen mockups we actually built it and we passed around our phone and said to the judges and said here you can play with this and that helped us really a lot again both about demonstrating something having a little bit of kind of excitement around what you're doing and also showing some of the business the business concepts in the business concepts for the product in actual kind of real form right it helps convince the judges that you've actually done something over the course of the hackathon okay so those are the seven tips right what I want to do is I just want to stop here for just a second before I go on to the remainder of these slides which is what do you do after the hackathon right and some other things to watch out for I just want to stop here for just a second and see if there's any comments or questions or anything right I think I've laid everything out right so is there any comments or questions who's talking is that him or is that someone in the audience I can't tell okay so any comments or questions so far hopefully all this makes sense right hopefully you had similar experience if you've done something alright yes I didn't know anybody when I went there that's right okay this is an excellent question so the comment is is when I went to this hackathon the start of weekend to be specific I didn't know anybody there everybody who was on my team I'd met for the first time on that day and the question was is can you go as a group and the short answer is absolutely we had some people at the start of weekend we were at who they had an idea they came as a team of like 4, 5, 6, 7 people and they were going to specifically work on something whether or not their thing got picked so yes you can do that in fact the other hackathon where I was talking about the kind of travel magazine application we put together we went as a team of 4 people to that hackathon so yes you can do that and often times that works really well so there have been a couple of hackathons that have helped mentor where basically a group of 5 or 6 people showed up they had an idea in mind already they already had a small start up that was in the kind of voice and internet space internet space and they had something very specific they wanted to build so they showed up they had everything in order of what they wanted to do they were well prepared well when I say well prepared they were extremely well prepared they came with computers and monitors so they dragged all the monitors in they brought sleeping bags with them they had everything they were really well prepared in fact I should have thought of this before I went to this hackathon I should have brought a sleeping bag and a pillow that's kind of at the extreme end of being prepared but you get the idea so they all came super prepared but they came together as a team so absolutely you can do that so the way that the formation of the team part I kind of skipped over that I just said you form teams so depending on the format if you specifically go to a start of weekend the idea is that you go and people get up and pitch and then they kind of whittle down and then they'll put like a large poster board on the wall and say for team A this is who wants to join and for team B and people will come up and say hey that was a great idea can I join your team what kind of specific skills are you looking for to build this etc etc so it's not completely self forming there's a little bit of stuff that happens before that or a lot of people just show up as a group with their own team preformed but a lot of people just show up on their own so that's typically how it happens but again that varies depending on the format of the specific hackathon that you're going to yes sir go ahead yeah go ahead please they've been coming here for years and so on and they are captain they are helping to be back to everyone so that was part of the work of the hackathon so we prepared Redfoot and beer and the meat bags and the rebel beer and meat bags that's all you need for a hackathon maybe some food we are shooting there for four of the 48 hours literally one stop so we will return to the channel and all sector and now we mentioned a lot of other very similar experience actually we did recently an online hackathon there were two radios from London who were actually doing it so all the parties were doing each other and within the next few hours we are going to go from this to the next okay excellent thank you for the comment so we're kind of at time now so what I want to do is spend I'm going to go over for a couple of minutes what I want to spend the last few minutes talking about is some of the things to be aware of and some of the things you do post hackathon if you really have a good idea or something that kind of gels and comes together really nicely so the first thing is be careful of who owns the intellectual property now I'm the first person to tell somebody that an idea is worthless okay most of the 99.99% of the time an idea is worthless there are a lot of people in Atlanta I run the Atlanta mobile developer meetup something I do for the community and a lot of times there will be an excited person who comes and like hey I've got this great idea when you're at hopefully this person doesn't mind me sharing his idea he's already got the app out so his idea was when you're at a noisy place like a bar or something and you want to order a drink you can just pull up a picture of like a ball of Kingfisher and just show it to the bartender I was like okay that's an interesting but he was completely sold that it was an amazing idea right maybe it is maybe he can really make something of this and he was like well before I tell you like how we do all this stuff in detail I want you to like sign an NDA I'm like no I'm not signing an NDA right ideas I'm the first person to tell you that ideas are worthless however when you go to a hackathon you actually build something and you actually try to implement an idea that's when you have to think a little bit about the intellectual property around this you don't have to be too crazy about this but there are two specific scenarios that you need to be careful of say you have a team I have Nourash on my team, this gentleman these three guys all these people I have these seven people in the front row on my team one of the things I'll talk about in the next slide is who I want to keep and say I'm the business owner so the people at this table did an amazing job and they did great they built the app and we got it all running the people at this table also did an okay job but they didn't really seem like they were that into the idea and the people at this table over here they were like they just wanted too much equity in the company Nourash comes around and he says well I want to join this company there is 60% equity in it right and you laugh but that actually happened to us at this hackathon so one of the things they did they typically do at a start up weekend is when you join a team everyone is encouraged on the team to sign a one page document that says everything I build over this weekend the ownership of it belongs to the team captain right so if I'm the team captain when we start hacking if something happens after the weekend I don't have to worry about who owns what because I own everything everyone has signed over the rights for everything that they built over the weekend to me and you might think that this is a little crazy and why would people do that but again the idea is that you avoid a lot of issues right and say you go to a start up weekend or some kind of hackathon for some reason you wanted 60% ownership it helps avoid a huge class of problems right and what they do the hackathon organizers will typically encourage everybody who is there to go along that path right and if you find someone who says I don't want to do this even if they're the most amazing developer ever you say let's find another team to work with okay I hate to be brutal like that but sometimes you have to kind of think about these things right so how many teams continue here's some stats approximately 10% continue after start up weekend this is these stats are very specific for start up weekend not just hackathons in general but very specifically start up weekend and you have to remember start up weekends are very targeted it's well known they do start up weekends all over the world and you know they have professional organizers who kind of organize and mentor people during the thing right so only 10% continue after that and out of those 10% approximately 5% of them are only alive after a year very very low success rate for hackathons specifically start up weekends right but this makes sense everyone knows that that start up companies fail 99% of the time right so one of 10 make it after a start up weekend or continue after a start up weekend and only 5% of those are still alive after a year okay so the odds are against you but again there's no reason not to try right I don't want to point a negative paint a negative picture too much right if it doesn't work out that's fine you move on with your life you know you do another hackathon or you do an idea on your own or whatever it may be so post hackathon a couple of different things so if you really stumble upon an idea right or maybe stumble is not the right word you come and build an idea and you win that hackathon or even if you don't win you think you really have a great idea right so the judges give you good feedback yeah this may actually be pretty good or you talk to people in the community alright so typically what I would say is that you identify just the team members you want like I was talking before I was pointing out these three different groups of people sitting in the front you identify just the people you want and you don't need to have a huge team right typically want not more than four people including you at the beginning you just don't need that many people you need a business person and three developers maybe right and maybe a designer okay and when you do start on this you get right this is after the hackathon right and you're trying to make a real business out of this you get the team members to sign a work for hire hackathon work for hire again before the hackathon starts and then after you identify the folks you want to give or you create a company the company owns all the intellectual property you transfer it to the company and you don't have to worry about IP issues and other things like that you basically iron everything out of front you tell folks how much equity you have you say you want to reserve 50% or 60% of the equity for investment so our slice of the pie will only be 30% and this is how we're going to split it up etc etc okay so this is probably how I would suggest approaching a post hackathon organization for building a company alright and I'll leave you with this quote from somebody named Johannes Gandhi a lot of folks who I've given this session before actually I've given it here in India before at another conference and I also gave it in Mexico a while back and also in the US a key point for a lot of people is people come to this session because they're just interested to say hey what are the things that you know that I need to do to win a hackathon and maybe to do a start up from scratch because there's nothing like doing a start up on the ground floor it's fun to join a start up that's already been established, it's already raised bunny but it's not as much fun or as much stress as doing a start up from the ground floor so if you are interested in getting into the start up world a hackathon is a great way to launch into that now you have some tips to help you essentially springboard off of it and get like a jump start when you go to a hackathon again hackathon is a great way to jump start your experience into building a start up but a lot of this has to do with making sure you have the right mindset that you put the specific actions into place so that number one you can be successful and number two you do the right things up front to set yourself up for success over the long term so for my own company we spent a lot of time up front thinking about things not too much, we thought about things a little bit but we put those thoughts into action as quickly as possible because we didn't want to waste our investors money so we immediately went and raised a seed round about two weeks later because we had so much momentum from winning the start of weekend hackathon we had investors who were like hey this is a really great idea we might be interested in investing so what do we do with that idea we immediately put it into action alright that's great let's talk let's put together a term sheet let's raise some money or you give us some money so we use that money to get seed we built a prototype, we tested it in the marketplace again action as quickly as possible build an MVP see how good it is we need to iterate on it further let's extend the MVP let's put it out into the marketplace within three months of doing the start-up weekend we had an app for sale the first version of the Triplingo app for sale on the App Store generating revenue within three months a polished app for iOS and for Android again putting action into play don't just think about it get moving get busy I know we're probably exactly at time now I'll be around for a little bit if you guys still want to chat but I think they want to do the keynote alright thanks for coming guys