Hack a startup

I have just spent an amazing weekend on Hack-a-Startup, which is a hackthon held by Tepper Business School in CMU.

There are three phases, the first step is to do an elevator pitch, then form a team to build the product, in the end, show it in front of all others.

There are many good ideas in the first phase, the most popular idea is to build an app which can organize your tasks according to your available time. The idea I choose to work on is to help students get a clear goal on their career by giving them advise.

Fortunately, I met our great team, Kartik is the idea owner, and we also have Kang, Xiaoran and I from school of computer science, as well as Serban from public policy. At first all of us are Tech-guys, but Kartik and Serban decided to do the business analysis part.

My role in the team is to build the server and collect data for Kang.

You always meet unexpected difficulties in your life, so LinkedIn hit us badly twice during the weekend. It does not provide API for us to access both full profile and jobs, neither can we use people search or job search. At last we are forced to use page scraper and get very few data. A few weeks ago, I also met something similar that Facebook does not allow third party applications to call their chat interface anymore. So it is important for you to have a deeper look at the public APIs you want to use before develop anything.

We not only met difficulties on getting the data, but also on dealing with data. Kang, since he took quite a few courses in machine learning, so he is the only one among us who is capable of dealing with the data. But the difficulty is beyond imagination, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to use data processing packages, and the result of the model is not ideal. It proved that data processing part is never easy and should not be expected to be accomplished in one or two days.

So the final winners of Hack-a-Startup are

1. MouseBuddy (turn phone into mouse)
2. Spacer (airbnb for storage spaces)
3. Pink Jellyfish (surfing app)
4. Resumideo (video resumes)

Tartan Hack is also a famous hackthon in CMU, which is held several weeks ago. The two hackthons are very different, the differences between Hack-a-Startup and Tartan Hack are:

1. Hack-a-Startup requires more thought on business model, target customer survey and profits, because it is held by Tepper Business School, and on the other hand Tartan Hack is a undergrad event, so it emphasize novel and originality.
2. Hack-a-Startup last for two days, so it forces you to go back home to sleep, most of the time, enough sleep is the key for effectiveness, so keep enough rest is crutial for productivity.

So, an ideal team for a hackthon, even a startup, requires more diversity. A CEO who is stick to his dream, a good UI designer, a tech savvy developer, a business analyst, a data scientist are all important parts of a team. Cooperation and communication are also very important.

And before go to a hackthon, please do as much homework as possible, and in the hackthon, meet as many people as possible.