Do teams survive after hackathon?

The benefit of participating in the hackathon is one of those topics that will always be discussed. Each side has its own arguments. Collaboration, HYIP, team spirit - declare alone. “So what?” Others answer gloomily and economically.

In their cyclical structure, participation in hackathons is very similar to one-time acquaintances in Tinder: people get to know each other, find common interests, do business, perhaps a memory photo, and naturally diverge, once again starting to actively search for fresh sensations and knowledge. Those 48 hours remain in the memory of a bright moment - and only occasionally meetings on hakatons (and on dates too) grow into serious projects. The more interesting it is to consider closer the history of startups that grew not on the walls of the MIT campus or during the protracted brainstorming of Google teams, but from the spontaneous unification of several young people at the next hackathon.

Feedback - our everything

One of the reasons why Markus Tan, Lukas Ngu and Keck Xiu Ryu decided to participate in the Singaporean version of Startup Weekend 2012 was that the event was held within the walls of their native National University of Singapore. For each of them, this was the first hackathon and the stated goal of participation was ordinary - “to make a cool project that will help solve an important problem”. The result of 54 hours of hard work, desperate disputes and intermittent sleep was the unconditional victory of the prototype of the SnapSell application, a familiar mobile variation on the marketplace theme nowadays, where users sell and buy various things from each other.
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However, the typical story of victory in the hackathon has evolved. “Through our landing page, we received several hundred emails, we even received tweets asking if we could download the app right now. This gave us confidence that we need to move on: to assemble a team and leave work, ”recalls Keck Xiu Ryu. Two months later, young people synchronously wrote applications for dismissal and began to turn a successful idea into a working app for iOS.

It will take two whole years before the company, which changed its name to Carousell, will attract 800 thousand dollars at the sowing round. By the middle of 2018, when the founders celebrated the sixth anniversary of the launch of the project, and the total amount of transactions made through Carousell was more than $ 5 billion, almost every resident of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand already knew about their application. Universal fame and record turnovers helped to attract large investments - Asian and American investors invested more than $ 126 million in the company.

Necessary people

Talis Gomez most likely did not know anything about Uber when he was going to the hackathon in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. According to Gomez, he developed the idea of ​​an application for monitoring buses. Everything changed after he had to spend half an hour at the bus stop in the pouring rain, waiting for a taxi. Easy Taxi application with which you could order and track the location of a designated taxi easily won the Startup Weekend hackathon. The event with the highest concentration of young and active guys from all over South America gave Gomez the main thing - goal-oriented, burning partners with whom it was possible to go through fire, water and copper pipes of subsequent pitches, search for investments and hard work on the application.



Easy Taxi is now one of the world's largest ride hailing services, operating in 30 countries and regularly absorbing less successful competitors in the Spanish-speaking markets. So, in early 2019, a deal was taken to take over Spanish company Cabify, the most famous uber-like service in Spain. Perhaps they, too, should start with finding a team on a hackathon?

Do everything to be noticed

A similar story happened with Aftership, one of the most well-known package tracking services that has fans in Russia. Andrew Chen and Teddy Chen met under the roof of the Hong Kong stage Startup Weekend. Immediately after the victory, future online retail celebrities threw all their strength and received a cash prize for the election campaign - in order to win the hearts of business angels, they had to win the global stage SW2011. The 90-second video about the project required by the rules of the competition did not shine with quality - the partners made it in a few hours using the services for animation of slides and the integration of the English voice acting (both spoke English quite moderately).

“Our story has become viral - and this is the main reason we won the global tour. We ensured that 7 editions were written about us and in every article there was a link to vote for us. One cool edition called us “three idiots” and after that the whole of Hong Kong learned about us. About 5,000 people voted for us - not such a big number. The victory [in the world stage] came as a surprise to us, but we were just happy, ”Andrew later wrote in a corporate blog.

Often the most difficult task for an artist, a writer, or a director is the transformation of crumpled thoughts into clear text, a sketch, or a finished script. Hackatons - just about that. They provide an environment where in record time you can turn an abstract idea into lines of code, application page thumbnails, and prototype plastic. And then - get feedback and decide whether to do something with it further. There is at least one general characteristic for all startups born out of the ashes, empty coffee cups and skinnings from bananas left after the next hackathon - the idea and its initial incarnation were too good to “give up everything like that”.

Many potential start-ups like to repeat that in the version of the Universe, where Apple, Facebook, Uber and Amazon are, it is difficult to come up with something fundamentally new and really large-scale. Meanwhile, the practice of world-wide hackathons and start-up challenges shows that the chances of leaving a mark in eternity, or at least making good money on a cool idea, still exist. Of course, single-mindedness is not enough. What is needed is a “critical mass,” that minimum concentration of talented people at which the “collisions” of the necessary characters and competencies occur.

The “Digital Breakthrough” hackathon from the platform “Russia is a country of opportunities” is the very event, the scale of which is sufficient to provide a “nutrient medium” for world-class startups. Judge for yourself: 40 cities of the regional stage, a prize fund of 10 million rubles and a grant fund of 200 million rubles. Perhaps you are the very IT specialist, designer or manager whose project will be the personification of this digital breakthrough. Until you try, you will not know. Do not be afraid of your ideas, boldly pick a team and change the world!