StartUp Confidential: Diary of a Rookie Dev, week 5
"Bout that Life!" - The FinTech Hackathon
Arrived at Alley NYC. Thought I would get there early to stake out a spot. No such luck. Chilled in the lobby waiting for my team on a comfy couch.
The space start filling up, bagels and strawberry cream cheese for breakfast.
Idea still not pinned down.
1. a social media aggregator that matched stock price to volume of tweets
2. crowd funding platform for businesses with a social mission.
Company intros, API demos, standing room only...The place is packed
While the API demos were being presented, I couldnt help but be distracted by the professional. First, he came in to the hackathon with a full fledged suitcase, apparently fully stocked with wires, computers and other gadgets. He spent the next hour setting up(toolbelt on hip!), mini-screw drivers set in hand, and generally making enough commotion to call attention to himself. I thought he was going to build an actual computer on the spot.
The TakeAway: Don't be that guy, or people will write about you.
After light quibbling, the idea is settled. The crowd funding platform.
We begin setting up administrivia: create project, github collaboration setup, screenhero setup, etc. This took about an hour, which wasted an hour of coding. But overall, we gelled quickly.
The TakeAway: Have your idea decided, your individual responsibilites loosely mapped out, and the administrivia completed, before you arrive.
Awesome Lunch: Plate full of grilled chicked, wraps, rice and guacamole for Qdoba
Dinner: Chicken wraps for days, still full from lunch though.
Darkness falls; literally and figuratively. Devise is on our brain, screwing
up things that ultimately will not be needed. A little self-doubt starts creeping in. Then we get re-energized by progress on the front-end
Start to refocus our thinking to only work on what will be show. Sign up/in process, see ya.
The TakeAway: Be flexible in your ideas, approach and give up on technical difficulties (aka "just hard code it" as Aiden told us in the prep meetings). Dont build your demo around your app, build your app around your demo. Create a layout of your presentation, build only what you will need to show.
Crowd thins out. More than half of the people are gone.
Starbucks run, streets still crowded, fresh air...revived.
Only the true warriors remain, and Jamal says it's because we have a grinding, hustling, get it done mentality because we are 'about that life" So, we informally become "Team: Bout that Life!"
Uh Oh, in order to use the Dwolla API we needed a real URL. We were only going to work from localhost. Now we need a live site. So, we switch databases from sqLite to postgres so we can throw it up on Heroku. We get most of the basic functionality complete. The Dwolla API is working and we pass a penny back and forth like it was gold.
Now we just cruise, doing styling stuff and generally joking around.
Test, Test, Test. It works every time.
We play a joke on Christienne (she left at 1:30am) that she would have to redo the styling of the home page because we lost it with github issues. For 5 minutes, we had her going. She also brought each of us mini-tooth brushes to freshen up, but I carried my funky breath like a badge of honor.
Christine managed to get someone to review our presentation and we met with him in a private room. He happened to be relatively influential VC in the start-up community. As soon as we began, he immediately interrupted, giving pointers, rephrasing our words and breathing life into our essentially boring and dry pitch. As we practiced our pitch, we loosened up and laughed, laughed, laughed. It made a world of difference. Although, we didnt have the best technology, I feel we had the most engaging 3 minutes of all the presenters.
The TakeAway: Your pitch is almost everything - Lighten Up Champ! Engage the audience, show what it does quickly and have fun. Be different in your presentation. Dont be to serious. Drink before you go onstage.
We get our presentation order:
Yay, we go fourth. Our other GA team, goes 23rd.
My goal for this hackathon boiled down to three things:
Build something that works. Done!
Present a good pitch. Check!
This hackathon was a great experience.
Ideas going forward for a hackathon prep
like the people you work with, you dont have to be best friends but liking the person helps ease ineviable pesonality friction
hackerleague - list a bunch of upcoming hackthons
participate in a hackathon topic you care about
have ten ideas to start with
have participants bring 2-3 ideas of there own
build teams by skill set (team = ux/designer, devs, even maybe a project mgr)
by first meeting - have teams formed with general ideas in place
by second meeting - have presentation views ready and demo it in group