How to organize a successful hackathon for your startup in 7 steps
By: Nikolay Rodionov
Tags: Hackathons, Team Building, Teamwork, Software Development, Startup

How to organize a successful hackathon for your startup in 7 steps Nikolay Rodionov Follow Jun 16 · 10 min read

As a startup, Streamroot organized a hackathon for five consecutive years, and we were eager to keep this tradition alive following our acquisition by CenturyLink last September. After another successful edition in February 2020, we’d like to share with you our toolbox and takeaways on how to organize a successful hackathon.

Step 1: Nominate an organizational committee

Organizing a hackathon requires focus and energy. To start, select a team of two or three people to become your organizational committee. We try to choose a new team every year to have new ideas and allow more members of the team to learn from the experience.

Step 2: Determine the budget and plan the logistics

Before starting anything, know how much you are ready to invest in the event. The main questions you’ll want to answer are:

1. Duration

A hackathon is a competition, and as such, it should be restricted in time. There are different options depending on how much time you are able to allocate outside of your day-to-day roadmap, and how intense you want the event to be.

24 hours : This very intense timeframe has little impact on day-to-day operations. However, it can be too short to build a meaningful proof-of-concept without teams pulling all-nighters; remember you will need at least two hours to bootstrap the project and two hours dedicated to the presentations.

: This very intense timeframe has little impact on day-to-day operations. However, it can be too short to build a meaningful proof-of-concept without teams pulling all-nighters; remember you will need at least two hours to bootstrap the project and two hours dedicated to the presentations. 48 hours : Our sweet spot. 48 hours is short enough to not impact your roadmap or operations and to keep a high intensity but also long enough to build really awesome projects.

: Our sweet spot. 48 hours is short enough to not impact your roadmap or operations and to keep a high intensity but also long enough to build really awesome projects. Weekend: This can be controversial (and could also potentially violate local labor laws). We tried several hackathons over the weekend or have let teams finish up their projects over the weekend by doing the presentations the next Monday morning. The advantage is that you give teams the opportunity to go the extra mile if they are really motivated. In the end, we stopped doing weekend hackathons because it was too advantageous to teams who worked over the weekend, and there was no clear end to the event (and we really enjoyed organizing our post-hackathon celebrations).

2. Location

You have many options that all have pros and cons. We tried pretty much everything:

In a team member’s countryside house : It’s free and usually provides a nice change of scenery from your day-to-day work. However, for that you need to have a founder or an employee who can host the whole team (almost impossible when you grow past 15 people!), and more importantly, you rarely have a good IT & network connection at a vacation home. It’s also more difficult to focus when you’re looking out onto the beach…

: It’s free and usually provides a nice change of scenery from your day-to-day work. However, for that you need to have a founder or an employee who can host the whole team (almost impossible when you grow past 15 people!), and more importantly, you rarely have a good IT & network connection at a vacation home. It’s also more difficult to focus when you’re looking out onto the beach… Renting a conference room outside of your workplace : This again provides a change of context that helps the teams to go all-in and fully focus on their work without day-to-day distractions. At the same time, it can be expensive, and again it’s not easy to find a place with good IT & network connectivity. We organized a Hackathon during our 2017 offsite in Portugal in which we ended up in a small hotel conference room with slow internet and poor lighting, which complicated the experience for everyone.

: This again provides a change of context that helps the teams to go all-in and fully focus on their work without day-to-day distractions. At the same time, it can be expensive, and again it’s not easy to find a place with good IT & network connectivity. We organized a Hackathon during our 2017 offsite in Portugal in which we ended up in a small hotel conference room with slow internet and poor lighting, which complicated the experience for everyone. At the office: This is our preferred option now. It’s free, and you can use all the connectivity and additional screens to boost productivity. It doesn’t really break the routine, but you can easily overcome this by creating new team spaces for the duration of the hackathon by repurposing your meeting rooms or just rearranging your desks.

Beach Hackathon 2016

Underground Hotel Hackathon 2017

Office Hackathon 2020

3. Budget

You have a lot of flexibility here; everything depends on how much you can invest in the event. We started with a €0 budget, and our latest hackathon was around €2,000.

Meals : You can go from paying nothing to picking up the bill for all meals and snacks day and night. We usually land somewhere in between, organizing a big lunch all together every day to encourage sharing between teams and paying for a pizza for the teams that want to work into the evening.

: You can go from paying nothing to picking up the bill for all meals and snacks day and night. We usually land somewhere in between, organizing a big lunch all together every day to encourage sharing between teams and paying for a pizza for the teams that want to work into the evening. Prizes : Again the budget can vary a lot here. The first year, we cobbled together a few nominal prizes and a recycled drone won at another hackathon… This year had an overall prize pool of €1,000, and the grand prize was a ULM flight for all members of the winning team. Side note: it’s always nice to offer real cups and medals — you can get customized trophies for around €20 online.

: Again the budget can vary a lot here. The first year, we cobbled together a few nominal prizes and a recycled drone won at another hackathon… This year had an overall prize pool of €1,000, and the grand prize was a ULM flight for all members of the winning team. Side note: it’s always nice to offer real cups and medals — you can get customized trophies for around €20 online. Space rental : As mentioned above, if you organize the event outside your office, venue rental takes up a big chunk of your budget.

: As mentioned above, if you organize the event outside your office, venue rental takes up a big chunk of your budget. Extra: Do you want to organize an after party? A healthy kick-off breakfast? Adapt your hackathon to your startup!

You can organize an awesome event with almost no cash if you are creative enough. Our first two hackathons were all personally funded and didn’t cost anything to the company. That said, it’s always good to know what you can spend in advance to better adapt everything to your budget.

A typical French lunch

Our 2020 prizes

4. Participants

Should this be a mandatory event?

If you make the event mandatory for the entire team, ensure that everyone can focus on their projects during the whole hackathon. This can be challenging or even impossible for sales and support roles. On top of that, you may need to convince the non-developer teams that the time spent on the hackathon is useful for them and for sales reps, more useful than time spent on leads. This requires much more vision.

We chose to make the event mandatory for everyone, with a few exceptions for customer support and sales representatives that needed to stay in touch with customers. We clearly differentiated however between participants that were “all-in” and those who would occasionally help. We didn’t count the occasional helpers as full team members to make sure we had teams that were 100% focused on their projects.

Should it be just dev & product teams, or sales & marketing too?

If you want to include non dev teams, make sure everyone’s skills can be used fully and that the project scopes accommodate this. We always make sure to have subjects that are more sales, marketing and HR oriented, and balance team composition to have all the right skills in each group.

How do you include your remote teams?

We have to admit we weren’t at our best in our last edition. We usually try to bring our remote team members on site for the event, but that wasn’t possible. The difficulty is not in having individuals working remotely but in having disparity; for instance, if four team members are on site and one remote, the latter can easily feel left out and miss important conversations.

There are many tools that can help integrate remote teams (Discord, virtual whiteboards, etc.), and having an always-open video chat helps a lot!

Step 3: Define the rules and structure of your Hackathon

This is the most important part of the organization, as it will help guide your creative minds. Do you want to select a specific theme or topic for all the projects, or let everyone work on whatever they want? On what basis will you select the winners?

This year, for instance, we wanted to focus on projects that either improve our lives at work or represent innovations for our product. Here are the rules that we had for our 2020 projects and the criteria for project selection:

Step 4: Set up a Call for Projects

Once the rules are clearly defined, employees can submit ideas. On our side, we ask each proposal to be sufficiently detailed as to include the following:

Short description of the project

How can it be useful to the company? (this was criteria #1)

How do you plan to do it?

Techs or skills required in the team

We then give everyone a few weeks to brainstorm and mature their ideas until the end of the project submission deadline. This time period also gives those submitting projects the opportunity to campaign for their ideas.

Step 5: Organize a project presentation and voting

Two weeks after the call for projects, we organize a presentation session where each person who submits a project explains and defends his or her idea in less than three minutes. At the end of this session, we let everyone vote for the project they would like to work on.

As in every selection process, the perfect matching between projects and people is almost impossible. You will always have some team members who are not 100% satisfied with where they end up.

Our process was built upon several iterations. Everyone votes for their top three projects in order of preference; the committee then makes a final project selection taking into consideration:

The size of the team : We banned solo teams to encourage teamwork and try to have teams with 5 or fewer people to keep them lean.

: We banned solo teams to encourage teamwork and try to have teams with 5 or fewer people to keep them lean. Skills required: We aim to balance teams so that at least one person masters each required skill/language. We encourage learning new skills, but it’s very hard to get concrete results in 48 hours if you’re trying to build an app with a team in which no one has ever done iOS coding…

We aim to balance teams so that at least one person masters each required skill/language. We encourage learning new skills, but it’s very hard to get concrete results in 48 hours if you’re trying to build an app with a team in which no one has ever done iOS coding… Participant preferences: We try to fit as many people as possible into their number 1 or 2 project choice.

This process is far from perfect, but it fits with the goals we set up for the hackathon: teamwork and building useful projects that will help the company to work better.

Inevitably not everyone will have their first choice, so you can always do a few team iterations to make sure the participants are happy before starting.

Step 6: Launch the hackathon

Now that the projects are ready and teams are done, it’s time to start coding! After a quick kick-off announcing the rules and the contest criteria, the teams set off on their project marathon.

We won’t go through this phase in detail, but here are some takeaways we’ve learned over the years:

Every team should have their own team space to work. Buy extra whiteboards and markers if you don’t have enough!

If you can, take care of the meals. During intense hacking phases, participants are happy not to worry about what to eat. Also, having lunches and dinners in a common space is an excellent way for the teams to connect and share with each other.

Ask for short and dynamic presentations. After 48 hours of work, no one wants to spend 3 hours listening to slides! Three minutes of context and two minutes of demo worked perfectly for us.

Make it feel like a real competition by enforcing the timing and the rules strictly. No late submissions or presentations that take forever, as it causes frustration and dampers the dynamic.

competition by enforcing the timing and the rules strictly. No late submissions or presentations that take forever, as it causes frustration and dampers the dynamic. Have your hackathon committee deliberate and announce the winners right after the presentations to keep the momentum going.

Celebrate the winners and the losers! Post-hackathon parties always left unforgettable memories for our teams :)

Post-hackathon party 2020

Step 7: Follow up and integrate the best projects into your roadmap!

You will see that your teams are capable of building incredible things in just 48 hours. But of course, even if projects work, they won’t be production-ready from day one. It’s very important to keep hackathon projects from rotting on a shelf by quickly adding the most promising ones into your roadmap and company life.

Almost every year, more than half of our projects are later transformed into new features or new products; some lead to significant technical leapfrogging that would not have been possible without breaking from our routine and taking the time to work intensively on the subject.

To sum it up

We hope this post will motivate other teams to organise internal hackathons. They are an incredible tool for many reasons. They can boost team morale and allow them to express their creativity and ability to innovate. They can allow teams to learn new things and work with new people. And finally, they can jumpstart innovation within your company with surprising innovations and insightful projects you could have never imagined in your day-to-day routine.

PS: Our teams are always growing, so if you would like to know more about Streamroot and CenturyLink, check out our careers page, and don’t hesitate to contact me directly at nikolay.rodionov@centurylink.com.

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