How to Pitch at Hackathons: Best Practices from an Industry Leading Hackathon Judge

In 2018, I led a team of three first

semester computer science students to

win the United Nations World Summit

on the Information Society hack for

education. And these are my top three

tips for how to pitch a winning

solution. And these tips are inspired by

Simon Sinek. Start with Why. And that's

our first tip number one, start with why

why is your solution relevant either from

a technical perspective, or from

a societal perspective, now,

usually, a hackathon will start with a

problem. So the temptation may be

just to restate the problem that you

were given. But I think this is super

lame, because often the jury already

knows what problem you've been given.

What they want to see from you is how

you interpret that problem, how you

understand the problem, from your

own perspective, and from the perspective

of your team. So don't restate the

problem that you were given, but

reinterpret it in your own imagination

and explain why your solution is relevant

for that specific technical problem or

social issue. Tip number two, how will

your solution solve the problem? Now the

tendency here is to go right into the

functions of your solution, and try to

explain what it is that your solution

does. But it's really important for

the jury that you connect the ways in

which your solution solves a problem. So

it's not good enough to just go straight

into what your problem does, you

need to be able to explain how your

problem creates value, and in which

ways it solves the problem that you're

talking about in the fly. So you're gonna

have to move up one step from what your

solution does, to try to think on a

higher level about how your solution

solves a specific problem. And

finally, what you've all been waiting

for. The last tip is all about the what.

So number three, what specifically

does your solution do now it's

important here to be clear, and concrete.

A lot of times innovators try to

hide behind creating solutions that do

everything for everyone, or they

make implicit assumptions that

they may not see, but the jury can

pick out very easily. So be very

concrete, be very specific. And this

means you're going to have to be brave.

This means that if you think your

solution can solve a very specific

problem, you need to lean into that and

spell it out for them, show them in

what concrete ways your solution solves

that specific problem. So top

three ways of making a pitch that will

help you win a hackathon. Number

one, start with why number two be able

to articulate how your solution

creates value. And number three, be

able to specify what your solution does.

And here's a bonus tip no matter how

much time you're given. Spend 20% of

that time explaining the Why spend 30% of

the time explaining the how and use 50%

of the time explaining the what

so if you've got a 10 minute pitch, two

minutes on the Y three minutes on the

how five minutes on the Wat Good luck,

you're gonna do amazingly well.