Winning Hackathons: The First Time Hacker and Non-Coder’s Guide
Never attended a Hackathon before? Not a problem. Can’t code? Sign-up! First time participant and winner Marc Ira, a student at Byte Academy coding bootcamp in New York City, gives us an inside look at a hackathon and his tips for winning.
An interview with Marc Ira by Emily Hunt:
Background: More than 120 individuals recently came together for 48 straight hours in order to “Break The Banks” in a FinTech (financial technology) hackathon held by Transferwise, a foreign money transfer “unicorn” based in London. Participating teams competed in order to develop solutions for consumer banking. In addition to $2,000 cash, Marc and his team won a dinner with the founders of TransferWise, which counts Richard Branson and Peter Thiel as its investors, and the founders of IA Ventures, a top NYC venture capital firm. They also won a $200 hosting from Digital Ocean, a pitch session with IEX traders, an alternate equity exchange platform featured in the book Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis, and a session with FinTech Startup Bootcamp accelerator.
Emily Hunt: Please describe your team members - was your team composed of absolute strangers?
Marc Ira: Although everyone was a “stranger,” team members were chill, with no real alpha types…we all had complementary skills.
E: What are some tips for working with people you don’t know?
M: Adapt. I signed up as a coder but quickly realized the two others were much more capable so I reverted to my old skillset on the business side of the project.Have the right attitude. I heard some other team leaders were too hard charging. But people were free to bail, so some did. And a team or two ended up with only one member.
E: Did you / team members sleep?
M: I went home Friday and Saturday evenings and came back early the next mornings. I heard there were some people who slept at the hackathon site. Many who lived in the city went home as well and came back early the following morning. Those who came from out of town (Philly, Boston, DC) may have kept on working.
E: What was your role on the Team?
M: My role was to help with market research, define the broad business case for such a narrow initial market and to help define the attractiveness of the project to the investors/ judges. I also tried to help with the coding (we used a Python platform with API calls), and I ultimately learned more than I contributed.
E: What advice would you give someone considering entering a hackathon who is not "technical" enough?
M: Never let technical skills, or lack of it, be a barrier to joining. There is enough work for coders, starting coders (front end) as well as UX/ designer-types and business-types. Better to get a mix of young (18 to 25) and old members. Younger members have narrow life experience and business scope, so the pitched ideas are superficial and not very practical/scalable. They understand what pain points are but can’t articulate the business proposition. Older members have deeper business and scalability sense. There is a niche for everyone to fill these three roles.
E: Please provide any other tips to win a Hackathon.
M: Just seek to have fun, make new contacts, and meet industry leaders in a low-pressure environment. Ideas are cheap, and no one will steal your hackathon ideas. Use the hackathon as a way to quickly determine if your app idea has legs. It will go through many iterations before it achieves product-market fit, so just have fun. Most importantly, use the hackathon as a way to stretch your coding skills, whatever level you are in. You will be surprised at how much can be done with about a dozen or so hours of focused coding.
E: What are your top three Takeaways from your first Hackathon?
M: 1. Join as many hackathons as you can
2. Join for the fun, the networking, the coding experience, and least of all, the prize.
3. Play to win. It's a long way to a real company, so might as well make it an interesting ride.
By Emily Hunt