I've done Startup Weekend once before and it felt like how the "The Business-A-Thon" was described. My friends and I did not know this would be the case going in and spent all of our time pumping out an MVP (which worked!) while the teams that won largely didn't have ANY code to show for their time. It was all slides and marketing talk. The winner DID have code but it was a <1hr rails app thrown together with no styling just a form to submit data to the backend and I don't even think they got it to process CC's (it was crowd fundraising thing). Ours was well thought out, looked nice, and WORKED yet we were beat out by people who could put together a more appealing keynote presentation.
It was a pretty big letdown and I haven't been back to SW or any hackathons since. I love banging out an MVP in a weekend with friends but not if we are going to be judged on our presentation and not our work. I know, I know that's how the real world works as well but I just expected better from the experience. I also understand that maybe SW is not aimed at being a hackathon but I just wish they could have given more weight to something that worked and was accessible today (also we spend the whole weekend minus about 8hrs total for sleep between 2 nights) vs a lot of marketing/sales talk (who left the venue early and showed up late).
Quick edit: Just wanted to say that I see this more as my failing to understand what SW was instead of me blaming SW for not meeting my incorrect expectations. SW is fine but it's just probably not for me.
So team up with a business / marketing person next time. They can build slides and do market research while you write code. I've judged a few hackathons before, and I've seen teams like yours lose because your MVP doesn't actually serve a market need. The market need doesn't even need to be profitable; but you need to define and communicate the problem your product solves. Many talented engineers can't do that.
This is how the real world works: the business side of things is often more important than the technical implementation. If you fuck up the business side of things and end up making the wrong product, it doesn't matter how clean or well-implemented it is. But if you have the right product-market fit and a good business process around improving it, you can become incredibly successful even if your product is written in PHP (Facebook anyone?)
I feel like this is missing the point, as I think the point being made by joshstrange also agrees with.
I don't want to go to hackathons to mimic the real world or simulate business savvy. I want to go there to spend 48hours building something that is technologically fun with likeminded people.
If "appropriate to become a business" is a criterion then it's not a hackathon it's a businessathon.
Put it this way: can I spend 48hrs building a mini hydroponic lab powered by a raspberry pi and arduino? Or should I spend that time making https://www.barkbox.com/ ?
> can I spend 48hrs building a mini hydroponic lab powered by a raspberry pi and arduino?
I don't see why not. Here's your pitch: recreational marijuana has been legalized in 5 states, but commercial sale is only legal in two, while cultivation for personal use is legal in all five. Additionally, if black market sales are included, marijuana is the biggest cash crop in the US with $35 billion annually. So there is BIG money in the market. A rpi/arduino hydroponic system is the first prototype of a product you can sell to consumers so they can grow their own in areas where they can't buy it. It's like Nest, but for growing pot.
Now have some business nerd spend an hour making a few slides and you're done. You have articulated the problem, the size of the market and the product you're creating. You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage, you just have to pitch it like you could.
@exelius, i think what @joshstrange wants to say is that a hackathon is a place where people want to build things whether it make sense or no sense at all.
Adding the business stuff is not appealing to hackers. It definitely is good to earn money out of it, but the fun goes away.
@joshstrange, a lot of developers felt the same way as you do. Startup Weekend should have emphasized that it is not a hackathon, but a business learning event. Or if you are dev, and you want to build your own startup, it's a good event to exercise a startup like environment. I have nothing against Startup Weekend. I believe it is helping a lot of people to become entrepreneurs but some of the organizers who are not well-trained might have misinformed the participants the real intention of the event resulting to this confusion.
@exelius, you've mentioned this part:
"Now have some business nerd spend an hour making a few slides and you're done. You have articulated the problem, the size of the market and the product you're creating. You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage, you just have to pitch it like you could."
--->>> That does not define a hackathon. That is a business pitching competition... Remember in a hackathon, you were able to build things, build something. There is a product after the event which you are proud to show & tell whether the audience like it or not... Based on your statement, what you're implying is that a hackathon can be just a pitch deck with an awesome pitch from the presenter, which is totally not what a hackathon is about.
> @exelius, i think what @joshstrange wants to say is that a hackathon is a place where people want to build things whether it make sense or no sense at all.
Agreed, I get that SW is not that but I wish there was something around me that was like that.
> @joshstrange, a lot of developers felt the same way as you do. Startup Weekend should have emphasized that it is not a hackathon, but a business learning event. Or if you are dev, and you want to build your own startup, it's a good event to exercise a startup like environment. I have nothing against Startup Weekend. I believe it is helping a lot of people to become entrepreneurs but some of the organizers who are not well-trained might have misinformed the participants the real intention of the event resulting to this confusion.
Again, I agree 100%. I think that they may do a decent job of telling people that but I missed it. It's a cool thing don't get me wrong, just not what I'm looking for.
No; I agree a hackathon isn't just a business pitch. You should also have to build a prototype that does most of what you claim it to. But most hackathons also make you justify that product's existence.
If you want to build something cool, you don't need a hackathon for that. Just build it. But if you enter a competition where people are judging your creation, then you have to be able to pitch it based on the judgment criteria.
A hackathon is a place where you can build your own thing, a place where you learn new things from others. For info, a hackathon doesn't necessarily mean a competition. It's an event where people come together and build things. People just added the competition factor.
@exelius, you see things only in the perspective of an entrepreneur or business dev. But what you are reading right now are the frustrations of the developers -- the pain points that most developers/engineers feel on how they are being violated with what's happening in these kind of events.
So in a hackathon, for you what should be the judging criteria? 90% can be a viable product based on a presention & 10% execution? Is that what you are saying? If yes, then it should be an idea-thon (not a hackathon), where people present their ideas and whoever has the best idea (which you, as a judge, think is the most viable product based on potential market size and potential usability) wins.
Again you're missing my point. I don't care if it's a viable business, I want to hack on something for the sake of hacking.
> You don't actually have to make the product beyond the prototype stage
But I want to, that's the whole point! Obviously you can pitch anything. I don't want to.
What you're describing is as perfectly valid '-thon' but it's not, at least in my mind and the mind of the author, a good hackathon. (For the avoidance of doubt I'm not talking specifically about SW whatever that is, but in general).
I guess what I'm yearning for is a return to the demoscene days :)
Well, a good product person can inform the design of your hack and likely improve it. But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.
Recently I have seen a trend of "useless hackathons" where the goal is to produce the coolest and least useful hacks you can think of (like a remote controlled toilet). I think the idea is to free people to just build stuff and not worry about it being useful. These ones tend to be community-organized though, for many of the reasons the original article author mentioned.
> But I get that engineers get tired of building things the way that other people tell them to.
Yeah, it's called my day job :) (In all honesty I'm not a code-monkey at work, I do have input into the future of our product if I didn't I'd probably be working somewhere else) If all that's going to happen is someone different is going to tell me what to build then I'm not interested. But remote controlled toilets? That's something I could get behind haha.
Oh, if I ever do SW again this is what I will do. I didn't mean to come across as sour grapes just sharing my experience and how SW fell short of my incorrect expectations.
> I've done Startup Weekend once before and it felt like how the "The Business-A-Thon" was described.
To be fair, SW is meant to be a "Business-A-Thon" and not a hackathon in the traditional sense. This is spelled out in many places, and they make it clear up front that the business plan is key.
> I also understand that maybe SW is not aimed at being a hackathon but I just wish they could have given more weight to something that worked and was accessible today
But that's not what they want to be. I'm not saying you have to like it, but rather that your perceptions going into SW was for it to be something it didn't want to be.
> To be fair, SW is meant to be a "Business-A-Thon" and not a hackathon in the traditional sense. This is spelled out in many places, and they make it clear up front that the business plan is key.
I understand this now, I decided to do SW at the last minute and hadn't done my research. See my edit above, I see this as my fault for not researching more what I was getting into not SW failure to meet my made up requirements to be an enjoyable experience for me.
Well, in reading these comments, it seems you aren't the only one that confuses SW with hackathon. Maybe it's the people I know locally and how they make sure to differentiate their SW and their hackathon, and how they are distinctly different. Maybe other locations just sort of stress a greater emphasis on hacking than the business side.
Regardless, it doesn't seem like you are alone. =)
Especially where I live (Lexington, KY) there are not a plethora of true hackathons to choose from. There are a few smaller language-specific groups that do some event but SW is by far the largest of it's kind in Lexington. So I jumped on SW when I found out about it. It was neat just not really what I was looking for. I get most of my "hackathon"-energy out by just meeting up with friends to work on an idea on a weekend.
That's the very thing you're presenting though. A viable business model. You're there to present a viable idea, not how well your gorgeous code works.
My team won a startup weekend here in Santa Cruz. And we didn't have working code, just a nicely made HTML page that looked like a fully fledged site. But we presented it in such a way that made sense from a business stand point and we won because of it.
> Quick edit: Just wanted to say that I see this more as my failing to understand what SW was instead of me blaming SW for not meeting my incorrect expectations. SW is fine but it's just probably not for me.
I now understand this to be the case I just didn't know that going in so for me it was a bit of a disappointment but I have no one to blame but myself and thats the only person I do blame. I do not personally like the way SW does it but that doesn't mean I think they are a bad thing just not for me.
I haven't been to a SW in about 3 years. But the last ones I went to were all people who brought their existing fledgling business they were trying to get started. Did who knows what for the weekend. Then just pitched it on demo day. That was maybe 60% of the groups that participated. Really a big let down.
Bringing an existing business you've been working on is against the rules. That should have been enforced by whoever was facilitating.
If the rules are well explained and enforced, and you keep an open mind, startup weekend can be pretty cool. If your idea is bad, it will get eliminated right away, and you have to be ready for that. It's also best to team up with people you don't know, and you might meet one or two people that you'll end up becoming friends with.
I agree it'd be better if different hackathons were clearer about what gets rewarded, but it's possible the real reason the other team won was because they presented (even if they didn't build) something that people wanted.
"Whoah, I want that!" > "Yes, that is functional."
It was a pretty big letdown and I haven't been back to SW or any hackathons since. I love banging out an MVP in a weekend with friends but not if we are going to be judged on our presentation and not our work. I know, I know that's how the real world works as well but I just expected better from the experience. I also understand that maybe SW is not aimed at being a hackathon but I just wish they could have given more weight to something that worked and was accessible today (also we spend the whole weekend minus about 8hrs total for sleep between 2 nights) vs a lot of marketing/sales talk (who left the venue early and showed up late).
Quick edit: Just wanted to say that I see this more as my failing to understand what SW was instead of me blaming SW for not meeting my incorrect expectations. SW is fine but it's just probably not for me.