How to Win EVERY Hackathon (from a Top 50 Hacker)

As an MLH Top 50 Hacker and having won at major hackathons like PennApps and HackDuke, I’ve discovered several tricks on how to consistently win at EVERY hackathon.

In this video, I cover what makes your idea a “winner”, how to make your hack technically impressive, and how to craft the PERFECT hackathon demo for big prizes.

#Hackathon #MLH #SoftwareEngineering

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0:00 Introduction
0:24 Hackathon Ideas
2:15 Prepare ahead of time
5:58 Hackathon Demo
7:37 Preparing your pitch
8:46 Last key points

[Yoges-yumn]

1. Make the judges emotional by the idea itself
2. Include hyped tech(like NLP, CV, LLM) that will make your project sound like innovation
3. Include a WOW factor in the demo - refine your UI
My additional tips - 1. Research the competitors of your idea and make a comparision table. Mention your novelty
2. Make a business model out of your idea and be clear about your target consumer
3. Do not start coding until you get a WOW idea/ WOW approach (sharpen the axe before cutting the tree)

[random-content]

1. prepare ideas in advance
2. focus on one specific aspect of product
3. Make it emotional and use trendy jargons
4. Try to use hardware display if possible
5.Gather attention

[PeaceLoveandMolotovs]

i like how you touched on every clickbaity trick in the book within the first minute of this video

[JabarriGarabito]

I stayed till the end — and it was worth it.

[ousmandiallox]

Naman I hope a great company hires you one day... You really have captured the essence of working cross-functionally in an organization so well in the microscopic context that is a HKTHN.

[Ash]

Major hacker describing hacks for hackathons - what the hack ;)

[harshalgaikwad]

That's so grateful of you for making such an awesome video on hackathon ! ♥️ Also as a beginner can you tell me what are the programming language I need to get command of to make it to the top 3 ?

[Sagardeep_Das]

your accent is just so naturalised just sounding like an American.

[kingarthr]

For doing ML in hackathons, how do you recommend making good use of time spent training the ML model?

[FanWind]

Hey! What would you say are the top skills to learn before competing in your first hackathon?

[derin]

Hello was wondering what you meant by technical complexity ( do you mean the wireframe ?)

[ryankbr]

could you go over some of the best or most popular technologies to learn for hackathons? ie things judges like to see or what you personally tend to work with?