What I Learned from Failing my First Hackathon
I want to tell the story of my first attempt at a hackathon. I believe it is important to showcase our spectacular failures as well as our achievements.
The Founding Team
Myself and 2 others I met from Discord began our project in high hopes. The hackathon we attended was a web3 Ethereum hackathon with 350k~ in prizes.
Slow Start
We had a great first 2–3 days progressing on our spec document and initial architecture planning sessions. Everything looked great “on paper”. Our first red flag appeared when we began saying stuff like this:
Coding is easy, we can write the code in the last few days, no rush. 🚩
We were stalling on our spec document. My lesson from this is to spend no more then 2–4 hours on a spec document, then get coding.
Nothing is going to be perfect on paper compared to a real implementation.
The Division of Labor
The 3 of us attempted to divide the work:
- 1 on Smart Contracts
- 1 on Frontend (myself)
- 1 on Backend / AWS.
This never went to plan. Immediately there was issues in the equality of output.
Team Troubles
As the division of labor broke down, we fired a member of our team who had not progressed any tangible code for our project. Project management roles have no place in small hackathon groups.
Developers only.
New Recruits
Luckily, a random developer messaged me and we upgraded our lost team member with a 10x stronger developer. New progress and fresh energy! Spec docs were trashed and GitHub commits were lighting up in our Discord channel.
Race to the Finish
Unfortunately the 1 week of initial progress we lost due to stalling on spec, was not enough to catch up and finish our ambitious project. We worked up until the last hours of the due date. We threw in the towel and said “welp gg”.
Hackathon Scam Artists
There is a “hustle” that exists where you take the same codebase to many different hackathons simultaneously to increase your chances of getting a reward. It pays off better to spam a bunch of hackathons, then to take your time with just one. We lost to a team which changed their copyright from 2021 -> 2022 and had a 256 file initial repository commit. Sad.
My Takeaway on Hackathons
Hackathons are great for students, hobbyists or pro teams. Depending on whichever skill level you fit into, this should guide your goals. I think one of our failures was mixing skill levels and motivations as a team.
Figure out if your team is here to make money, or just have fun. Your still better off just making a startup and reaching out to investors if you have a super good idea and have the coding skills to create it yourself.
I will limit myself to 1–3 hackathons per year and stay focused on real clients / startups. I will vouch my team members more thoroughly before hand. All in all, I did learn a lot and enjoy the experience. No regrets.
