What I Learnt From My First Hackathon
By: Ben Field
Tags: Ideation, Ideas To Execution, Mvp Development, Startup Lessons, Hackathon

About a month ago, I took part in the “Hack Your Future” two day hackathon, run by Melbourne’s amazing Hacker Exchange (HEX) team. I’m super happy that my team made it to the finals and I think I took a lot away from the experience.

I’ve summarised the idea development process we went through and some of my main takeaways below. I believe many of these techniques are applicable to projects well outside the sphere of startups.

Set clear goals and make sure you understand your team mates (and yourself):

Before you embark on a project, it’s valuable to first define what success looks like. What is your ideal outcome from this project? Do you want to build a billion dollar company and save the world? Do you just want to get a better grasp of photoshop? It doesn’t matter what your goal is, it just matters that it is clear. When your goal is clearly set, you can selectively work on the activities most likely to get you there. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up to waste both your time and energy.

This is doubly important if you’re working in a team. If you and your team mates aren’t aligned on your goals and values, you’re destined for conflict. Avoid this with clear communication before you start working. Talk to each other about both what you want to achieve and what you value. Put these at the core of your work.

Start from a clear problem and ideate rapidly:

Too often, people come up with an idea or solution and only afterwards look for the problem that it’s solving. This leads to investing your time and resources in a product that no one actually wants. It is far better to first identify a problem to solve. Preferably this problem is a big one. Not necessarily big in the sense that it affects millions of people, but big in the sense that it’s really painful for the people who have it.

A really great thinking technique that was brought up during the HEX ideation workshop with Jac and Phoebe was the diverge/converge approach. Essentially, the diverge / converge approach is about generating a large set of ideas and only afterwards filtering through and judging them. In the context of startup ideas, the diverge/converge approach would entail looking at a theme or area of interest and coming up with as many problems related to your prompt as possible (the diverge stage), do not classify your ideas as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ yet, it’s all about quantity.

In the converge stage, you look at the list of problems you came up with and decide which one’s are the most interesting / worth pursuing. Now that you have a well defined problem, you then repeat the diverge / converge approach for coming up with potential solutions.

While I’ve presented the diverge / converge technique in a relatively narrow context, I think it’s an immensely powerful and versatile tool for boosting creativity. It’s one of my favourite takeaways from the entire hackathon.

Conduct market research:

Once you have an idea, you need to validate it. You’ve made a number of assumptions in the ideation stage which it is imperative that you test. Market research is a continuous process in all stages of a businesses lifecycle, although it takes different forms depending on what stage of life your business is in. At the idea stage, market research is:

a.) Primary: Identifying and actually speaking to your target customer. You do NOT want to be pitching your idea. Good market research is listening to your target customer, learning what their problems are, what they’re interested in and how they think.

b.) Secondary : Looking at the available information on the market you’re attempting to enter (reports, articles, market size, competitors etc).

Jeannete and Matt from the Hacker Exchange gave an excellent breakdown in their talk during the hackathon which I’ve summarised below.

The 6 Step Market Research Process:

) Define your customer

What do they do? Where do they shop? What do they watch? What are their values? This is essential for both understanding who your customer is and for figuring out where to find them.

2. ) Define gaps in your knowledge

What assumptions have you made about your idea, your market and your customer?

Identify where each assumption sits on a scale of risk (what happens if you’re wrong?) and certainty (how sure are you that you’re right?). Doing this will allow you to know which assumptions it is most important to test.

3. ) Design your research plan

How are you going to conduct your research? What sources will you use? Will you send out surveys? Will you conduct sit down interviews?

Have an idea of what sort of data you need and how you’re going to get it. It is good to have a mix of quantitative (numbers and statistics) and qualitative (worded and observational) data.

4. ) Conduct primary / secondary research

This is the two types of research I outlined previously.

5. ) Do customer research

Actually go out and speak to your target customer, learn about them. This is essential.

6. ) Make business decisions

Use your findings to steer your decision making. Have your assumptions been validated? Did you find out any important information that you didn’t know about beforehand? Your research will allow you to make an informed decision on whether you should start actually building your idea or whether it still needs some tweaking.

Define your business model:

Decide how you will generate revenue. How will the project sustain itself?

A super useful tool for working through the fundamental business elements of your idea is the Business Model Canvas. It is freely available online and is an excellent scaffolding for thinking about your idea as a business.

Build your MVP:

Once you’ve done a satisfactory amount of planning, the next step is to build. If you’re not a coder, tools like Webflow and Bubble allow you to build a fully functioning product that you can get in the hands of your users. You don’t need to build anything crazy, the aim is to create the minimum viable product that will solve your customers problem.