How I won $30k doing hackathons

It was september 2018, I was working for the last 6 months on a Crypto Collectible game on the Ethereum Blockchain that never saw light. I invested my own money, did a crowdfunding with a few people and reached a humble amount of $7k of seed funding for the project, unfortunately after paying the pixel artist, developers and the "unexpected" crypto market crash the project went from thousands of dollars to $0 in just a few weeks. The project was cancelled, people hated me for losing their money, and I was left with only a few hundreds of dollars in my personal savings.

Before this project, I was working on a corporate tech company and left to follow my dreams of becoming an indie hacker, so for me this was a very sad game over in only 6 months.

I spent the next few weeks looking for jobs and freelance opportunities, fortunately I met Oscar, we had been following each other on twitter, liking and retweeting our stuff but we never said hi to each other until that moment. He worked on a small 3 people development studio with 2 more partners, they were running out of funds (just like me) and needed someone who knew front-end development (also just like me) so he made me an offer to work with them and participate in the upcoming "Hacktoberfest" hackathons. I accepted.

1 - Blockchain Hackathon (Mexico City)

Sponsored by Unicef & friends, this +90 person and 48 hours hackathon was intended to solve human right problems by using blockchain. Our solution was to connect the Twilio API to ethereum to register refugees on a single blockchain.
Say what??? It sounds like a bad idea because it's a bad idea, but guess what? We won.

But why?

Our code ? Nah, it was a disaster. It wasn't working at all.

The beauty ? We didn't had a UI or something to show.

It was all about the pitch, when we realized that we didn't had something functional we decided to make a good pitch. We decided to use the twilio api with a "live demo" of the blockchain and good story telling while others got into the main stage talking about TPS, technical stuff and doing some boring technology focused pitches.

We ended up winning ~$4k in prizes and a sponsorship for a Blockchain Summit in Bogotá, Colombia.

So the first lesson here is: Judges don't care about technology, they care about your solution and how it solves the problem. The easier and flashier you communicate this, the better.

2 - Blockchain Summit Latam. (Bogotá)

So the team and me got into the summit without really getting serious about the hackathon. This one was only 24 hours but the crowd of people participating was bigger ~120 developers.

You could choose any topic you want in this hackathon, there were no restrictions but just the use of blockchain as the core of your project. We were competing with very talented developers but at the end we won just because a small detail.

Every team was using ethereum, hyperledger, and modern technologies for their projects, but they left a small detail out of the equation, the sponsors.

The ones who sponsor the hackathon are usually the ones that have the final decision. This time the sponsor was $DAI and $MAKER, the ethereum stablecoin.
We were the only team who built a project around the ecosystem and this got us first place and the prize. (Also the project is good, I open sourced it on my github)

Companies, Organizations and Individuals sponsor hackathons not because they are good samaritans, they do it because it is a cheaper and sexier way to do marketing so they could talk about adoption and new ideas.

So the second lesson here is: Give the sponsor a good reason to justify their investments.

The total prize here was around $5k plus many stickers and swag.

3 - Hackathon Teletón (Mexico City)

Teletón is the biggest Charitable foundation here in Mexico, and just a few weeks after returning from Colombia we decided to participate in this ~200 people hackathon. Each year, this foundation makes a massive all-weekend event were they try to get funds for disabled kids. Last year they collected $374,000,00 MXN (or ~$17M dollars) from only people donations.

This foundation was the target of internet attacks because they weren't enough transparent and the goal of the hackathon was to increase their trust on donators with technology solutions.

72 hours to code the best solution.

This one was hard because we were competing against teams with very experienced developers and with multiple backgrounds. The prize was a new brand car and a trip to Microsoft HQ in Seattle. This time we used sponsors technology and did a flashy pitch but guess what? Others did it too. So how did we managed to won the prize ?

We cared about the goal of the hackathon, teams created very complex and over engineered solutions but we were the only ones who reached the organizers and ask what was the real problem. They didn't need an OCR app, a virtual reality game or a blockchain solution. All they needed was a website that updated their donations. And that's what we did. We won the prize before pitching because we already knew what they wanted and we did it as they wanted, before presenting into stage the judges were asking us when will this could be delivered.

Third lesson: Treat organizers as if they were already your clients

This project got us a lot of media attention, and we even got into national tv and radio just because a simple website.

The total prize was valued around +$15K but we ended up selling the car.

4 - Creaton Hackathon (Mexico City)

Not the best hackathon, but it was the easiest one. In order to reduce gender violence, a technology company organized this hackathon, we participate but by our luck there were only a small number of teams and we won because we were the only ones who delivered something else than just slides.

Even when we didn't felt we deserved the prize the organizers gave it to us for assisting and taking our time to help the issue.

This net us around $7.5k just for taking our time and participating.

Fourth Lesson: Just assist and do your best work, you never know what would happen

After this period, I already had the funds to keep following my dream of becoming an indie hacker and launching my own products such as stackmatch.io , a developer job platform that matches your skills with companies that need them.

I'm not doing hackathons right now since It takes a lot of energy, time, coffee and mental sanity away. But if you're planning to do it, I hope this helps.