How Not to win a hackathon
It was Dutch Open Hackathon edition 2. Around 275 developer, more than 50 teams, around 20 were selected for finals including our team. with equal number of prizes to be won, we thought we made it! but at last, nothing for us this time.
why? we were so sold to the idea - to save food worth 4.4 bn annually in Netherlands alone just by scanning a bar code. its awesome that technology can change so many lives and save so much money by simple action of feeding right data to our system.
You can see more details of project and how it works here
But this post is not about what we did. its about what we did not do. the only thing we did not do was, attending previous year's hackathon!
Yes. lets find out what happened.
During the final presentation, one of the jury member who attended previous year's hack, found that there was a similar idea last time and wanted to know where they are and how we are different from them. we showed that we had unique features like knowing how much money worth of food the app saved you, we can suggest recipe based on food's age, and may be even find your carbon footprint some day and do your bit in saving the planet. but we had no idea where the last year's team is today. and seems that we did not offer something strikingly promising. not yet, not during the hackathon at least.
The learning is, do your homework. attend all hackathons that you can. be prepared well in advance. give your best. if you still don't win, it's fine. at least you can do retrospection, write a post like this and make the idea better in next year's hackathon ;)
we may not have won the hackathon, but we have found that with help of technology, it's possible that your grocer can save you money, feed the under-privileged people, become your dietitian and even family doctor someday.
By the way, one of the biggest retailer in Netherlands has invited us for a recap meeting, along with other hacker teams who used their APIs during hackathon, and I hope to write a 'positive' follow-up post based on outcome of that meeting.
Dedicated to the spirit of hackathons and urge to innovate.