Tips to make the most out of your hackathon idea submission — Sandy Inspires

Make the perfect idea submission for the next hackathon with these tips and tricks, you might also win it. Thank me later.

$ whoami

I’m Santhosh Kumar aka Sandy (Sandy Inspires), I work as a Data Engineer II at Rakuten, Bangalore, India. I’m from Salem, Tamil Nadu, India and I like hacking for fun.

I have won 12 hackathons with over $15K (12 Lakhs) in cash and participated in over 20 hackathons from 2019, got a KTM RC bike and Macbook Pro 14".

I’m also a Microsoft Certified Trainer with six Microsoft Certifications and a conference speaker, talking at Microsoft London Office, Microsoft Bangalore Office, and Microsoft Chennai Office.

Enough of my story, let me help you now to write a killer bio like mine.

Contents

1. Idea generation
2. Idea refinement
3. Idea presentation
4. Preparing the slides
5. Conclusion

Idea Generation

I get this question a lot, how are you able to generate winning ideas, Sandy? It’s very simple actually, let me explain. All or most of my hackathon winning ideas solve something I wanted to see in the product or service that a company’s product is providing. It solves a problem I have or I wanted to solve.

The crux of it is, it has to solve something at the end of the day.

Here are a few metrics that most people look for,

1. Originality — how original the idea is
2. Potential Impact — can you make a buzz with this idea
3. Design/Technical Implementation — How does the app look and can it handle load

Idea Refinement

Share the idea with people, let me repeat it again, share the idea with people around — I hear you saying, what if they copy the same idea?

The more you share, you’ll understand more of the idea yourself and refine your idea further. Let them copy if they want to, but you can make it better since you have the vision.

Important reason to share is to get an understanding of how people will receive your idea and are you able to make people understand your idea.

We’ve Gmail and Outlook, Android and iOS, proprietary and open-source, finally, we’ve original and copy — you’ll know just by looking at it.

Don’t worry about your idea being copied — if someone can copy your idea it’s not good enough — might not apply to all.

Idea Presentation

Once you’re ready with your idea, you need to know what to share, how to share, and how much to share.

Let me explain,

What -Share more on the way you’ll make the prototype work
How-Generally PPT works best (with fewer words)
How much — Don’t present a working prototype, you’ve to keep the juries on the edge, and add a unique suspense that this prototype will bring in

Not sharing a lot doesn’t work, sharing a lot also doesn’t work — you need to find the balance between them.

You just need to convince the juries that, this idea is worth giving it a shot for the prototype phase, have a proper roadmap and plan for execution.

You don’t have to follow exactly what you’ve shared during the idea submission phase, since a lot of things won’t work as you think. You might need to tweak things a bit to make it work.

Preparing the slides

Your problem statement and solution are the most important slides, followed by the architecture.

Below is the format I followed for all or most my hackathons,

1. Problem Statement or Motivation to solve for
2. Market Analysis — can be of an existing solution or some facts
3. Architecture Diagram of your application
4. Features or Unique Selling Point (USP) of your application
5. Impact Numbers or Statistics

You can move these around as desired, not all these might apply to all the ideas or hackathons.

Make sure you read through the submission guidelines of the hackathon page to understand the format.

Not all hackathons will allow you to choose the slide order.

Conclusion

You might not get results immediately, it takes time to understand how the hackathon works and get the hang of it. I started winning hackathons in 2021 and started participating in 2018, you get the idea right!

I didn’t know anything about hackathons, I just went there and stayed for 2 and a half days, and saw firsthand what people do in a hackathon. It was an amazing experience, I remember drinking Boost on the rooftop of the office around 7 AM on the presentation day.

Thanks for reading this huge blog post.

Best wishes on your next hackathon submission!

Do comment if you liked it or if you need more information on any of the above topics.

#sandyinspires