How we almost won the Hackathon with mediocre design, humor, and a shit product.

This is a story of the moment I saw the power of presentation in influencing people.

I was in my first year of university, my department (computer science) was holding a Hackathon.
I teamed up with a programmer friend and the most important member of our team, to come up with an idea, design and develop a product.

We were in over our heads. We knew next to nothing about developing products, my programmer friend was barely a programmer then, I was barely a designer and our third member was there for emotional support.
Everyone looked like they knew what they were doing except us. They were all in their third, fourth and fifth years. The only other first year students had programming jobs.

We were already at a disadvantage then we decided to pick an idea that was next to impossible for us, and almost unnecessary.

The concept was simple.
Alot of students have trouble keeping up with classes, and this affects their performance badly. but not any more thanks to Audiolect.
We tried to create (thought of creating) an app that would hear what the lecturers are saying in classes filled with hundreds of noise making students and convert the audio to text.

The only problem was we didn't know how to make Audiolect. We didn't even know where to start. Even if we managed to make this app, it wasn't the best solution to the problem. Why couldn't lecturers just share the notes with student before class?

We ignored all these concerns and proceeded, we were young entrepreneurs changing the world. We were excited.
With help from Google and stack overflow and free internet we worked on it for the days straight with almost no sleep.

On the third day (presentation day). We didn't have a product, (we didn't even have a presentation ready).
We watched the first few presentations, we were fucked. How did these people all have finished working products. Did they also have just 3days.

We asked for our presentation to be last. And I got to work. Pushing pixels for our presentation. It was a rush (I love working under pressure), it felt like I was on drugs. There was no time to edit so there werealot of raw unfiltered Jokes in there.
I had stage fright so I didn't present. Our emotional support friend talked for most of it and he did an amazing job.

Everyone was having a good time, they were all laughing they forgot that we didn't show them a product, they loved our idea because they related to the problem we tried to solve.

At this point we thought we had won. Because everyone loved us, we won their hearts, even the VC judges.

It was a success.

We didn't win but we had a good time. One of the VCs have is good number that we should contact him if we wanted to work on anything else in the future.

Lessons:
Just do it. Start before you're ready
Presentation is everything or its already very important
Humour makes people like you and/or your product
Take risks (except where it isn't detrimental, obviously) the lessons might be worth it even if you fail.