Why do business hackathons?

Hackathon is not only pitches, spiches, features and free pizzas. This is a serious tool for business development, its presentation in a specialized environment, generating new contacts. Moreover, the hackathon itself requires an adult approach to the organization. If we treat it as a business tool, then it should be carried out methodically.

So this post was born: to tell what the hackathon is “from the inside,” as the organizers see it, what goals it pursues, how the audience is gradually brought up and the philosophy of such events is taking shape. I will explain not even on fingers, but on hares and on the example of a series of hackathons conducted by us HackDay.

Hackathon and hares

In 2009, one HackDay cost 80 kilo rubles, the budget of the event today is 400 kilo rubles and above. Expensive. And yet they continue to be held with enviable regularity. What for?

When launching a hackathon, and especially a series of hakatons, a company in a spherical vacuum can kill three birds with one stone (the hares are arranged in descending order of the statistical probability of their appearance):
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1. PR hare. Yes, the hackathon will significantly increase the brand awareness among the profile audience. Press and post releases, social networks, blog posts and other delights of online promotion - this is all necessarily accompany any hackathon.
2. HR hare. Yes, you can find intelligent and promising specialists on the hackathon. We, for example, are engaged in outsourcing the development of technically complex startups, and the hackathon audience is quite suitable for us.
3. B2B hare. Yes, you can find intelligent and budding clients on the hackathon. The first time you need to be prepared for the fact that none of the requests will not turn into an order, but this is not a reason for despondency: the process of selling technological services is always long and difficult.

In the five years of HackDay’s existence, we, as hare hunters, have suffered many successes and failures. Now HackDay is a series of “working weekend” format events, which are held at intervals of one and a half months in different cities. Extreme geographical points - Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg and Almaty.

We walked to this format for several years, but at first we could not get at least one rabbit.

Why were the sights downed?

1. Our experiments with themes. After the first hackathon in 2009, we received a stream of requests for studio services, which stopped ten days after the end of HackDay. None of them turned into an order, and we decided to go by a circuit: we made Kino-HackDay. The event turned out to be inspiring, but it ate a lot of resources and did not yield the expected number of responses. And HackDay, planned as a musical one, failed miserably. And failed just for the second reason.
2. Razdolbaystvo co-organizers. Initially, idealists and enthusiasts acted as local co-organizers. These are excellent human qualities, but they are not enough for methodical work. A large number of co-organizers of the failed musical HackDay did practically nothing of what was promised, and the event was canceled a week before the deadline. And HackDay, like any business project, requires consistency and consistency.
3. Delight of the participants. There are very few people among the hackathon audience who take their project as a business and are serious about collecting a team. In all cities, young people with burning eyes come to the site, light on pitches, and then disappear along with their projects and beautiful names. All these guys are usually very young, and only a few manage to get out.

The main problem is the understanding that something needs to be crammed, not supported by the understanding that the code is not yet a business. We also didn’t have an understanding that holding a hackathon is not just finding a platform and running geeks there. Back in 2009, there were no experts who could tell the children (especially not in Moscow and St. Petersburg) that business is not only a website on the Internet, but persistent, bitch, work. And then no one could tell us how to make the hackathon profitable, successively killing all three birds with one stone. And now, when there is experience, we can tell about it ourselves.

How did we kill the hares?

1. Changed the model of interaction with co-organizers. Having accumulated life experience, we began to take in local organizers business incubators or IT companies and studios that needed PR for their services. The sponsorship partner model allows you to receive a part of the money from the sponsors, and to transfer part of the costs to the partners' shoulders. Sponsors can be interested in HR-opportunities, a range of projects for investment, promotion of their products and services. The partners are often government organizations - business incubators, embassies.
2. Hackathon turned into a brand. Under the HackDay brand, we launched a school with short-term paid courses in programming, marketing, sales, and interface design. Part of the income from this school goes to cover the costs of HackDay.
3. Paid format. To cut off the idle, we decided to make the hackathon paid. Surprisingly, the threshold of 500-800 rubles significantly improved the quality of the audience: those who are really motivated to work and create a product really come. And in the first year we received a lot of angry letters with outrage and complaints about the high cost. The cost of entry to the hackathon does not cover half the cost of the participant’s meals, but a fair amount of unfortunate businessmen fall off at the time of payment.
4. Tracking projects. We began to actively follow up on projects since 2013. This allowed at least to collect statistics and analyze their own progress. Let's say that now we know that in 2013, out of hundreds of developed projects, about twenty continue to live and develop; three projects received small angel investments. If we consider that in five years about 50 projects have been developed, we already know that the survival rate has become higher.
5. Mentor sessions. With the advent of successful projects on the market, it became clear that their experience had to be taken and transferred to projects at the idea stage. We began to invite employees and founders of such projects. The mentoring session is the consultation of the project authors with experts. Unfortunately, many still do not find communication with mentors useful. Yes, there are unique people who do not need outside help, but there are no more than one for an event. Others will long wander on their own in search of the right solution, and most likely will die after the development of the prototype.
6. Strict organizational regulations. Now HackDay works according to clear rules of the organization, which are listed in the official position of 50 sheets. This is the healthy level of bureaucracy, which is necessary for any business process. Previously, HackDay was, like the whole market, flexible and creative. Now this is a system that gives certain results.

These six moves have seriously increased the survival rate of projects. Previously, literally only a few survived, but now we can say that after the event for half a year, half have already been working and living. We do not know how long and how successfully, but compared to what happened a few years ago, this is a real breakthrough.

We traveled this way before bringing the event to its current level. In order to receive the benefits described above from the hackathon, it is necessary to constantly increase the level of organization and projects, otherwise the advantages from the organization will turn into disadvantages.

In the following articles we will talk more about the internal kitchen of HackDay and its work in conjunction with the studio.