How to win hackathons
Think, execute and win.
Intro
The next Solana’s global hackathon by Colosseum is coming in April 2025. As a grand champion of the Radar Hackathon in October last year, I wanted to share my playbook on how to approach the hackathon process to not only win, but leave with important connections and quite possibly, a funding offers.
Disclaimer: There are many different playbooks to hackathons. What worked for me might not work for you. If you plan to participate, make sure to think your way through the process, don’t just rely on this article.
Why hackathons exist
The first question you should ask yourself when participating in the hackathon is why would anyone do a hackathon in the first place? Huge organisational and marketing overhead, months of preparation and large sums of money have to be put upfront, and at risk. Nothing is promised - winners can just take the money and dip after the hackathon.
While this seems like risky and unprofitable business, it’s in fact a great funnel for VCs. Hackathons proved to be very efficient in attracting upcoming founders and making them build businesses out of very simple ideas.
The money spent on the hackathon rewards are usually less than a single check that VC invests in a seed round, while the number of participants is much, much higher - usually +1000. VCs don’t treat hackathons as coding competition - they treat it as a test for founders.
Idea
I believe the idea to be the most important component of every hackathon. While execution is obviously crucial, the quality of execution you see in hackathons is usually low. The reason for that is very simple - in most cases month is not enough time to ship a quality product. Especially when the hackathon period also includes assembling the team, reiterating on early user’s feedback, etc.
But here’s the thing - nobody expects you to ship a groundbreaking product in four weeks time. In fact, most products that are submitted to hackathons are often half-baked MVPs, or just ideas with a pitch deck attached to them. It is very often the case that good ideas with minor to no execution outperform shitty ideas that are already being shipped.
Not only in hackathons, but in tech business in general, the engineering is quite easy part of building the company. What’s much harder and much more valuable is founder’s understanding of market dynamics, ability to read and ride narratives and the right timing. That’s the real test you’re taking during the hackathon.
The idea you decide to go into the hackathon with is an actual reflection of the above skills. Do you have enough understanding of the market to determine what product might outperform the market in the next months and years? Are you accurately predicting what will be the next hot narrative? Your idea is an answer to those questions. Spend most of your time before the hackathon to find the right idea.
Execution
When I wrote that execution is not important couple lines above, I lied. It matters, but only matters if your idea is good enough. The execution you do is a proof you’re making to the hackathon judges that you’re not only correctly selecting the right narrative at the right time, but you also have a deep understanding of what you’ve selected.
I highly discourage taking the ‘current hot thing‘ and building a product within this narrative without deeper understanding of the problem you’re solving and market you’re offering to.
Another part of the execution process is obviously engineering. While important, don’t forget about the soft parts of the execution. Quite a lot of amazing developers will participate in the hackathon. If you’re reading this, I can ensure you that there’s a better developer participating, who’s spending their time writing code, not reading articles. But you can outperform them by executing on different vectors that they might be unconscious of:
Branding. People tend to be very visually-driven. While looking at a table of thousands of projects, you’ll likely stand out by having clean branding and good looking logo. Think of a good one liner that will keep judges’ attention and make them dive deeper into your product.
Documentation - while I’m usually against writing large product documentation (no user reads them), judges with smaller technical capabilities might appreciate some documentation that helps them understand what you’re building, without necessarily looking deep into your GitHub repo. This might also be a great way to show your skills in expressing your thoughts and communicating clearly in writing.
UI/UX. People that are judging the projects may not have deep engineering skills and likely won’t appreciate the underlying tech. They will appreciate a good-looking, intuitive, and most importantly - working - demo.
Initial user base. This is easier than it seems and works great. Reach out to people, get 20-30 initial users that are excited about what you’re building. They will not only help you reiterate on the product by providing feedback, but also act as a proof to the judges that there’s a potential market for your project.
What to build?
If you’re looking for a narrative or a specific sector to explore, here are some of my bets for the next hackathon. Take into account I’m mostly building in DeFi, so those bets are heavily biased towards the DeFi track. I’m sure there’s lots of stuff to be built for other tracks, too!
Alternative Liquidity
Alternative liquidity is an umbrella term I use to describe products that disrupt the traditional way of thinking about on-chain liquidity provision (AMMs and CLOBs). Recently, we’ve seen the giants of our industry (like Jupiter and Kamino) turn towards alternative sources of liquidity for traders, like RFQ.
Whether it's RFQ, Drift's JIT liquidity via Swift, DFlow's 'conditional' liquidity AMM or other products, there's a great acceleration in this sector. Status quo of simple concentrated LPs likely comes to an end, and building alternatives in this sector is a great opportunity.
Alternative Governance
We’ve seen some acceleration in this sector last year, mostly thanks to the MetaDAO’s futarchy. While some DAOs adopted futarchic governance, it’s still severely underexplored and there are some great use-cases for it.
A need for alternative governance tools has been also proven by recent SIMD-228 discussion and voting process. Consider that even though the voting process was completely unofficial and executed via third-party, open-source tool developed by Jito and Laine, the voter’s turnout was +70% of the network’s validators.
Above numbers show that governance is still hot and exciting. Most governance tools we have are old and obsolete. Build governance!
MEV
Solana has a growing problem of MEV and stake centralisation, which as a consequence grows a potential market for teams building in this sector. While completely 'solving' the MEV is objectively a meme, there are objectively parts of this market that went completely unexplored on Solana.
MEV-resistant DEXes, intent-based solutions (for both bridges and swaps), MEV protection and reporting tools, alternative validator clients and block builders - most of these are either heavily underexplored or do not exist on Solana at all.
Stablecoins
Programmable money remain one of the best use cases for crypto in the real world. Stablecoins, in terms of infrastructure, as well as their on-chain volume, are still largely underdeveloped on Solana and growing very fast.
In the upcoming months, you should explore yield-driven decentralised stables, algorithmic and alternative-collateral stablecoins as well as local currency stablecoins in the developing countries and infrastructure for stablecoins interoperability.
Alternative Trading Venues
While on-chain trading is a perfect fit for blockchains like Solana, majority of the markets available today are very basic. Enabling trading of alternative markets and currently underexplored trading products - options, bonds and commodities will be what ultimately enables the decentralised NASDAQ that Solana wants to become.
Decentralised exchanges also still struggle to offer wide variety of financial derivatives to trade on-chain, even though average on-chain trader is much more likely to trade risky instruments than a trader in traditional markets.
Other interesting vertical are on-chain trading and hedging strategies that are already being explored by teams like Neutral Trade or Gauntlet thanks to the Drift Vaults. I’m expecting this market to grow as lending and LP yields decline.
Even though Solana scaling helps, most of the on-chain trading venues are still too slow to offer market efficiency even remotely close to what CEXes have to offer. Trading venues that further optimize on-chain trading by moving components off-chain will ultimately attract market-makers and win in the long term.
What’s next?
The most important thing you have to understand about hackathons is that they’re not the goal themselves. You should treat hackathons as the first step in a longer journey to build an actual company out of your month-long sprint.
This is why I usually advise people against going into the hackathon if they’re looking for a side-project or if they simply want ship something for the love of the game. If your idea cannot be turned into a company, you will lose anyway. And if you don't want to turn a good idea into a company, you’ll likely miss a great business opportunity in exchange for the financial prize.
As I mentioned - hackathons are funnels for investors to filter out the most promising founders and projects out of the noise. The next step for the winning projects is usually an invitation into the Colosseum Accelerator Cohort, along with an $250,000 of pre-seed funding and introduction to other VC firms.
What’s next? Build, raise, hire, iterate and look for PMF. Obviously, nobody puts a gun to your head to execute on the idea that you went with into the hackathon. You’re free to pivot, and sometimes it's even advised.
Building in the right narrative, for the right market, at the right time is more important than the hackathon project itself. If there’s no PMF in sight, pivot will be better for your company in the long-term. Take into account however that pivots are usually very costly processes. Costly in terms of time, money and people.
Closing words
The point of hackathons is to filter out the best upcoming founders and accelerate the process of breaking with the project into the mainstream. They are not about the project, but more about you as a founder. Jury is essentially looking for the best people to execute on the right thing, at the right time, in the right place.
You’ll most definitely optimize for winning the hackathon by simply optimizing for building a profitable business. Select your idea very carefully, making sure you have deep enough understanding in the problem and market dynamics. Start small, iterate quickly and get initial users as soon as possible. Don’t get lost in the engineering process and don’t forget about the ‘soft’ execution - that’s what’s gonna make you really stand out from the noise.
Good luck! If you have any questions, feel free to message me. If you’re interested in Reflect, the project I’ve won the grand prize in Colosseum Radar Hackathon with, definitely check it out at reflect.cx or Twitter.