I’ve been getting this question a lot lately from people doing their first hackathons: how do you actually win a hackathon?
After doing a bunch of them, here’s my honest take. Most people think hackathons are building competitions. They are not. They are idea and storytelling competitions.
Before writing a single line of code, figure out the problem you are solving and how you are going to make judges care about it in a three minute demo. If the story is not convincing, it does not matter how technically impressive the project is.
The best teams usually spend real time on ideation first. Define the problem clearly and shape a narrative around why it matters. Once that is clear, then move fast and build. Use AI, tools, and anything that helps you ship quickly. Hackathons are not about building something scalable. They are about demonstrating a compelling idea.
It also helps to make the project visually impressive. If it is an app, make the UI look polished. If it is an agent or system, make it do something cool during the demo.
The biggest thing I have learned is that every winning project has a moment where the judges think, “wait, that is actually really cool.”
Some of the coolest demos I have seen stick with you. One team built AI voice agents that would call hotels during the hackathon and negotiate prices to get them a cheap place to sleep. This was before tools like OpenBot existed. One of my own was ApexNurse, an AR powered “face shield” interface for nurses that surfaces patient information in real time. Another fun one I saw was basically GitHub for Minecraft, where players could collaborate and version control builds.
The code matters, but the experience you create in the demo matters more. I have been getting this question enough that I figured I would just write my answer here. Curious what strategies others have found work well in hackathons.