Having Fun In My Maiden Hackathon-like Experience

On Monday and Tuesday, I've participated with an Hackathon-like event called IdeaSmash (organized by my company). The idea is to let the employees experience the start-up process (from ideation to pitching the idea to the judges, yes, it's a competition too) and along the way pick-up the design thinking skill. 

It's an eye-opening experience and an action-packed one as well. It's chaotically fun! Within the 36 hours, we are literally created SOMETHING (at least the prototype) from NOTHING. There are 10 teams in total and we (from the Football Kakis team of four) managed to pleasantly surprise even ourselves to clinch the champion spot for this maiden event.

Personally, the experience and knowledge that we gained from this event outweigh the prize itself. Some of the key learning points are:

1. Idea generation is easy, the tough part is generating the idea that the potential customers/users care about. 

2. There are so many free tools around in the market to help the start-ups (or for that matter, any individual) to:

a. Create cool Landing Page within minutes (Strikingly is the tool that we've used to create out landing page) 

b. Prototype your idea (POP or InVision, there are three types of prototyping: Paper Prototyping, Digital Prototyping and Native Prototyping, these 2 tools/apps enable user to create the clickable digital protoypes in minutes) 

c. The 10-20-30 Rules of Pitching (Maximum 10 slides , maximum 20 minutes, 30 point of font size)

What we've achieved within the 36 hours?

1. Generated an idea : Football Kakis

2. Created and published the Landing Page

3. Created and launched the first Facebook Ad

4. Did the market research of our idea through face-to-face interview

5. Created the prototype of our App via InVision.

Start-up is a teamwork and it needs lots of collaboration, communication, validation and learning/relearning. 

Cheers!