How to Win a Hackathon

A sponsor’s perspective

This blogpost is written on the heels of a few amazing weekends spent knee-deep in students in Toronto and Los Angeles at Hack Canada and LA Hacks, engaging almost 2000 students in person in total. Managing a sponsor track, I have some thoughts on good ways to present yourselves when angling your project towards a sponsor prize.

For those not as familiar with how student hackathons work, they are usually comprised of an organized weekend populated by college undergrads (or older, or younger! high schoolers are increasingly getting into the mix). Over about 36 hours, students form teams and try to build software that meets a need, solves a problem, or proves a point. Some hackathons focus on themes around social good, like Hack Canada which challenged students to build something of special interest to Canada. Others have several themes and a full roster of sponsored options.

Hackathons are a bastion of the cozy web! It’s a delight to see students embracing the freedom to create weird, useless, and wildly creative apps like AeroMaxx, a way to gauge influencers’ aerodynamic-maxxing (Taylor Swift is more aerodynamic than Clavicular, did you know?). LA Hacks even had a track embracing the “most questionable” hack, won by “Yes? Or Yes!”, a hack that had literal goldfish helping make decisions and trigger AI agents to do things like break up with a girl friend, quit a job, and post to social media. Great projects. Please keep building this kind of weird stuff.

a cozy interface for roommates to manage their shopping lists: MagByte

It’s a great moment to let your creativity run wild:

Yes? Or Yes! LA Hacks most unhinged hack winner - goldfish help you make decisions and then trigger agentic workflows. Good luck!

I’ve been working the hackathon circuit as a developer advocate for at least ten years, including the mess during COVID, and the major difference nowadays between the earlier events is, unsurprisingly, the heavy use of AI tooling that both speeds up delivery, polishes the final product, and gets more software shipped, way faster. Instead of watching demo videos, judges can actively interact with an almost production-ready app, shockingly quickly.

Still, there are some tips and tricks that I’d like to share based on a few recent observations of these very fun events. Here are five things to keep in mind as you go for a win!

Who’s it for?

A lot of folks are attracted to social-good type projects, and that’s very laudable. I love them, personally, and tend to mark them highly in my judging rubric. I just want to caution hackathon participants against going after this vector with a “tech savior complex”. It’s easy to think that tech can solve all the things. And tech has made great strides on devices such as most smart phones to help people with various accessibility issues such as those who are blind, color blind, experience hearing loss, or are mobility-challenged.

But if you are going to create a project for a given sector of users, it’s critical to come at these projects with an open mindset and humility, and to work with people who have these actual challenges. Working on an app for older people? Call your Grandma or Grandpa before you start building. It’s likely they can guide you to refining your app to make it much more useful.

At Hack Canada, teams succeeded who spent time talking to local security guards as they built, to ensure that their safety-oriented hack would be useful. It’s all about finding your customer and/or user, and building backwards from that.

Power to the People

Sponsors and mentors are often available to help you all the way through the event, so make use of them! Take some time before you start working to talk to sponsors and see if they can help you start to ideate. Learn about the various sponsors and what they are looking for. Some are looking for product feedback, some are hiring, others may have another agenda.

Maybe you’ll find a product that you never heard of and will make a nice professional connection. Get your LinkedIn app ready to scan codes! This is a great moment to network.

At your service at the booth!

Skill Up

The use of AI tools has accelerated the build phase of a hackathon almost beyond recognition. When I was judging hackathons around 2016 or so, the projects produced were super shaky - often the hacker created a video at the moment that the app worked, and showed that to a judge as it was highly unlikely they could ever get it working again! This has all changed when AI has become such an important build partner.

The use of AI, however, shifts the focus of a hackathon away from the software engineering tasks that now can be offloaded to agents (with supervision, of course!). Now, you need to spend a good amount of time getting set up to make your AI as successful and efficient as you can. Many vendors have created tools to help; we at Cloudinary produced a Skills Pack for this purpose: https://github.com/cloudinary-devs/skills. Using tools such as these will effectively give official context to your app, preventing hallucinations and other wasting of time.

Sponsormaxxing and platformmaxxing

There’s a trend towards “sponsormaxxing” - LA Hacks even had a track for this. The term refers to the incorporation of as many sponsors’ platforms as possible in a given hack. I think it’s a fun challenge, but there’s a risk: if you want to win a sponsor track, you’ll likely be judged on deep integration with their platform.

In our case at Cloudinary, I’m looking for not just the use of the platform as a place to dump images and video, but a deep use of the APIs, for example optimizing and transforming images in an AI pipeline with the goal of constructing videos (as you can do with our winning hack from LA Hacks, StudyO!). Going for a sponsor track prize? Focus on deep integrations.

Going deep, however, can also be risky! There’s the risk of “platformmaxxing” - using every bell and whistle of a platform to try it out. You may need to be a bit strategic here, as you might max out your credits by piling on as many platform aspects as you can. Watch out for signs of maxing out your credits and plan accordingly.

Speaking of maxxing: AeroMaxx

Perfect the Pitch

Judges have only a few minutes per team so you need to make your best impression right away. Come ready to demo with your storytelling skills well in hand. Do some trial runs prior, and get feedback on your presentation skills. Lead with the use case, show the demo, and field questions. A good strategy for a 2-3 minute hackathon pitch is to focus on the problem you see, the solution you propose, and the impact you predict.

• Hook (15 seconds): Introduce yourself, state the problem you are solving, and share a relatable scenario or story.
• Demo (60-90 seconds): Walk the audience through your core feature
• Tech (30 seconds): Briefly explain the most impressive technical hurdle you overcame or the tech stack that powers the hack.

Tip: Consider recording a video of your demo just in case there’s a horrible glitch, and practice getting over a glitchy demo. You can do it!

Pitching can be intense!

Winning a hackathon is a great goal, but don’t forget that being accepted into some of these selective hackathons, participating, and building a piece of software that you can be proud of is very laudable as well. Wishing you the best of luck! And maybe we will see you there.