Why Hackathons are a Good Fit for Startups

by Jamie Johnson
May 29, 2013

After our second successful internal hackathon, many folks have asked us why we choose this style of product development.  While many people understand hackathons to have certain definitions of large sponsored events, many companies have internal hackathons to tackle specific projects.  In fact, the facebook "like" button was developed at an internal hackathon a few years back.

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Over the past few years, the team at Verde has built several app products, an energy efficiency API, and several websites.  Our normal product development is likely the same experience that everyone has - it typically costs twice as much money and tackes twice as much time.  At times that we are tight on money as a bootstrapped startup, it can take even more time as dev work gets put on the backburner.

Last year, our developer brought up the idea of an internal hacakthon.  I was surprised that the entire team was up for it, and that long development was as much a frustration to developers as it was to me.  After a 48 hour sprint of HTML5 development, we created the Stopwattch app.  We used angular.js before it had become more mainstream, releasing a pretty good product in a short time and very little sleep. 

For this latest project, we were building a carbon accouting tool for an Australian Energy Company to help them automate retrieval and viewing of carbon data from various energy points throughout the outback.  The customer liked the idea of having something built in a short amount of time, and we were excited about trying out the hackathon model again for an agile development project. 

While it is certainly different to develop for a customer as opposed to your own MVP, the experience was very similar.  Very little sleep, some good comraidery, and in the end - a product that was 95% complete after 48 hours.  While our first hackathon was hosted at one of our apartments, this time we choose 1871 as a location.  I was surprised at how quiet 1871 is on the weekends, considering the vibrancy and energy during the week.  It made a great place to work, and I even found a soccer ball to kick around the long empty hallways.  

On the personal side, the hackathon can be tough on family.  The Thursday before our hackathon began, my daughter was running a 104 degree temperature and ended up having a virus called Hand Foot and Mouth Disease.  Just to really make my wife's weekend a challenge, I accidently disconnected the power to the dishwasher before the weekend started when our garbage disposal started smoking.  My days as a firefighter sometimes lead me to overreact to smoke, but we all have our quirks.  One lesson learned is that it would be a good time to have the in-laws visit when we are doing a hackathon, to have some extra hands on deck.  

The hackathon is a few days past, and we have all gotten caught up on sleep and back into our normal routine.  I spent a little extra time this week at home with my wife and daughter, and even got the garbage disposal changed out.  So, it is worth considering the hackathon style for your next MVP product development, and you can read more detail about our experience on Verde's Blog.

Here is a quick look at the customer portal, built on Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database gathering data, using Twitter Bootstrap for the UI.  Special thanks to Trevor Ewen, Ian Greig, Jason Falcone, and Arun Sivashankaran for their unique dedication on a holiday weekend.  

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