How I Won Three Hackathons in a Row
From June 2023 to March 2024, I participated in three hackathons as a solo hacker and took prizes in all three. In this post, I share my thoughts on what I believe have been the main drivers of my success.
For the context, all hackathons were online, related to Web3, and co-organized by Protocol Labs. As for my background, from 2015 to 2022, I participated in four hackathons (two onsite and two online). My team and I won two of them.
This time, I was hacking solo, and here is what I think helped me succeed.
I was building for myself
In two cases out of three, I was solving my own problem. To be more specific, two of my projects were related to (now discontinued) Saturn – a community-run distributed content delivery network (CDN) for Web3. I was interested in the project, ran a node, and saw a lack of observability in the Saturn network. So, I built better observability tools. Tools that I needed myself.
My motivation for the third project was learning about blockchain scaling solutions and getting hands-on experience with sophisticated Solidity contracts.
I was laser-focused on shipping a minimum viable product
I aimed to ship from day one.
I often asked myself, "What's the minimum amount of engineering required to implement the very initial version of the feature X? What can I not do to narrow the scope of work?"
And then, on every iteration, I strived to have something working and available for others to try.
It balanced my perfectionism, protected me from over-engineering, and helped me gather feedback early.
I engaged with the community and sought feedback
With every subsequent hackathon, I was more active in the community. I asked questions, submitted pull requests, demonstrated prototypes, and asked for feedback. It's hard to overestimate the benefits of interacting with the community and your potential customers.
I worked almost full-time
As a solopreneur, I had the luxury of dedicating most of my work time to a hackathon project. This way, I had time to research technology and tools relevant to my project and time to build a product that looked good enough.
Yet maintaining motivation and focus was a bit of a challenge for one hackathon that lasted a month. Having a break and switching to other projects for a few days helped me finish and submit.
I was selling
In a video presentation for judges, I focused on defining the problem and explaining how my project solves it.
I preferred to leave most of the technical details behind the scenes, in the README file within the project's GitHub repository (example).
Demonstrating how the project works was a crucial part, too.
P.S. For those who are interested, here is the list of my hackathon submissions: one, two, and three.