How I won my first hackathon
400 users for our small hackathon project in 3 days
From Idea to Release in 17 Hours 🤯
160 Users before Our Pitch on Sunday! 📈
Last weekend was great! I was with star working student of Studymaniac Lennart Dammer at his first hackathon, the Ideaspark by SV Informatik GmbH.
The Challenge ❓
To playfully and innovatively raise awareness for personal insurance needs among Generation Z.
Our Solution 🎮
A web app for playful simulation of one's own life, similar to the well-known "Game of Life". Players can make decisions about their life, including choosing the right insurance, and compete for the high score.
The Process 📈
We arrived on Friday evening. After a short introduction, we had to find our teammates. This process took 2 hours, but we were able to find a great team of 5 people.
1. Ideation: I had the idea for a game of life clone with insurance topics. After I learnt a lot about user research from my new teammates, it took six long hours until we agreed to pursue an adjusted version of my idea.
2. Building: After our team went to sleep, Lennart and I coded a minimum viable product from 2am to 7am using React and Laravel. When we went to sleep, we had a working prototype without any design. We woke up at 9am and continued our work on the project. I implemented a design optimized for mobile use and Lennart created the content for the game. The rest of our team started working on our pitch.
3. Launch: We launched na-sicher at 7pm on Saturday. By spreading the word among the employees of SV Informatik GmbH and posting into our friends' WhatsApp groups, we were able to get to 100 users in the first 4 hours.
4. Pitch: On Saturday around 1pm, Julia, Leo, and Duc pitched our project to the jury. We were able to convince them and won the first prize of €4,000.
The Result 🎉
We convinced the jury and won €4,000.
My Learnings 🤔
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Execution beats idea ⛏️ All teams had very cool ideas to gamify contact with insurance, but we were able to implement our idea quickly and even validate it on the streets of Mannheim on Saturday night. Probably the funniest evening I've ever done at a hackathon!
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Focus on the pitch 🎤 We were able to clearly distribute roles, and our pitch team had enough time to fully focus on rocking the pitch!