Should Your Company Sponsor a Hackathon
By: Erikka Innes
Tags: Hackathons, Developerrelations, Programming

Hackathons are everywhere, even online. Whatever tech conference you attend, you can be sure to see this event included. Companies offer cash prizes to developers to build the best functioning solution using their products within a limited time. Developers form teams or work alone, and rush to program a champion application. These events are fun for developers, but the question is are they a good investment for your company? You can answer this by thinking through two important questions:

What goal do I want my company to achieve by sponsoring a prize in a hackathon?

Is my product ready to be used in a hackathon?

Hackathon Goals

As a company, you should attend a hackathon with a specific goal in mind. By setting a goal up front, you can ensure you’ll get the maximum benefit from attending the event. Here are some popular goals to consider:

Learn What Kind of Developer Experience You Offer

One of the top reasons to sponsor a hackathon is to learn more about the developer experience you offer. Often times B2B companies will write this off as something they don’t need to consider, but that’s a misnomer. Even if you don’t sell directly to developers, creating a good developer experience helps your product sell. It might be because developers want to work with your product more. But more likely, if you create a great developer experience it means your product gets implemented and used quickly. When your product is in use is when you start to earn money, so it’s important to make it easy for developers to work with.

Some feedback to request and to look for at a hackathon includes:

Is it easy to sign up for your product?

Are all the credentials and requirements immediately available to the developer?

Do you have good documentation to help them walk through popular beginning use cases?

Do you offer complementary tools to make developing easier?

If you take the time to watch the hackathon, you can see directly how well you are doing with sign up, ease of use, and documentation. Developers may also ask questions that make it clear what part of your product experience is good or bad. If they can’t find something for example, that’s a sign that you may need to rethink how your content is organized. If something doesn’t make sense, there may be an issue with how the product is designed or how the documentation is written. If developers keep asking for something you don’t provide, like a particular integration that’s also useful information.

Over the course of multiple hackathons, you can adjust your developer experience and receive feedback at each event to find out how well you’re doing.

Spot New Talent

Hackathons often engage small teams of engineers under an immense amount of pressure to create a solution that works in a short amount of time. David Gilbert of Samsung writes:

‘You also learn how to work efficiently, how to work as a team and how you can put your skills to work in a quick-turn environment.’

While he’s writing for potential hackathon attendees, it still applies. You will be able to observe developers working together under pressure, and see who thrives in this setting. If finding new talent is your main goal, you can even create a prompt that encourages teamwork. For best results, Thomas Griffin, co-founder and President of OptinMonster recommends that you ‘choose a project in advance.’

Find New Product Use Cases and Product Ideas

If you create an engaging prompt for a problem to solve using your product, you may get new solutions and ideas that inspire new products or features at your company.

Branding

Branding requires you to sponsor multiple hackathons and you should have a good developer experience in place before trying this. If you offer a difficult developer experience and continue going to hackathons without changing that experience, you can negatively impact your brand. However, once you iron out the wrinkles, so things are running smoothly, using hackathons for branding is a great idea. This works best for companies that offer their product directly to developers, or B2Bs that pride themselves on good developer experiences.

A good hackathon experience can put your product on the map for developers. Hackworks writes:

‘Associating your brand with a hackathon can change the public’s perception of your brand and help acquire developer mindshare.’

Community Building and Developer Engagement

When you enter your product in a hackathon, you have the opportunity to connect directly with developers and start building community. Add developers to social media or a forum to stay in touch after the event. Livechat suggests posting event pictures and videos to remind people of the event and your product.

Is My Company Ready for a Hackathon?

Before sponsoring a hackathon, you should do your best to make sure your product is ready in the following ways:

You have an easy, automated sign-up for a product trial.

Getting started documentation is complete and detailed.

If developers require something special to develop with one of your solutions, you make a sample readily available to them.

You have a well written statement describing what problem you want developers to solve with your product.

Make sure your hackathon team is ready in these ways:

Marketing team members have topics they can discuss to interest developer as well as business personas.

Technical team members are familiar with the product from the developer’s perspective so they can help troubleshoot issues they encounter.

Technical team members are versed in two or more programming languages that are popular for implementing your product.

Any key instructions for getting started with your product in the hackathon are available on a one-sheet for developers to take with them.

Attend the Hackathon

If you’ve selected a goal for your hackathon and you’ve prepared your product and your team, you’re all set. When you attend the hackathon, if it’s onsite, try to quietly observe how developers experience the different products they develop with. You can learn about what to do and what not to do from other products at the event. And of course, you can learn about the developer experience for your own product.

Take detailed notes on everything you see and hear. I recommend labeling feedback with which departments or teams you think may benefit most from the information. Sometimes, there’s a tendency to downplay positive feedback — but don’t do this. If you receive positive feedback, take detailed notes about what people liked. This can help your company do more of the same in the future.

Regular attendance of hackathons may not be for every company, but if you offer a product that requires developers to implement, you should attend at least two a year when you are still ironing things out. Take notes at each hackathon and try to improve on your developer experience before the next one. Make sure they are appropriately spaced out to give your teams time to make any changes. Once you have set up a good experience, you don’t necessarily need to continue attending hackathons. Whether you do will depend on your goals and strategy.