You’ve registered for the hackathon, joined the Discord, and scrolled through the website. Suddenly, you freeze. You have no idea what to build. As Glory Praise Emmanuel describes it, you and your team are brainstorming—another marketplace, another wallet—hoping for divine inspiration before the deadline hits. We’ve all been there. I’ve mentored dozens of teams who hit this exact wall. The common advice you hear is to code faster, learn a new framework, or pick the hottest tech. But that advice misses the point.
The real secrets to hackathon success are counter-intuitive. They have less to do with pure coding prowess and more to do with strategy, communication, and perspective. This isn’t just about winning; it’s about making the entire experience more valuable, more creative, and more impactful. Forget what you think you know about winning; here’s the playbook that actually works.
1. The Real Prize Isn’t the Prize
The biggest misconception is that the grand prize is the ultimate goal. While the prizes are a great incentive, focusing solely on them is a rookie mistake. The true, lasting value of a hackathon lies in the experience itself.
Martin from CERN emphasizes that these events offer a unique opportunity to leverage “collective brain power” and exploit “complimentary skills.” It’s an intense, collaborative environment you can’t find anywhere else. Shantanu, a PhD student at MIT, echoes this, highlighting that a hackathon is often just the “start of the journey.” The connections you make with fellow competitors, mentors, and organizers are frequently more valuable than any prize money. As Shantanu shared, he met a participant at a hackathon years ago who went on to build a startup, and to this day, “this person still WhatsApp calls me like once every two months just to stay in touch.”
Success isn’t about the check you cash at the end. It’s about the unique experience, the personal growth, and the community you build along the way.
2. Your Personal Problems Are Your Best Ideas
One of the hardest parts of a hackathon is the brainstorming phase. The pressure to invent a world-changing idea from scratch is paralyzing. The secret? Stop looking for a global problem and start with a personal one.
Glory Praise Emmanuel advises participants to look at the pain points they or people around them face every day. Does your school portal crash every semester? Is paying your electricity bill a struggle? These local frustrations are often just smaller versions of global issues. This strategy is incredibly effective because it grounds your project in a genuine, relatable need. As I always tell my teams, an authentic problem leads to an authentic solution.
“judges usually love ideas that are actually tied to maybe a personal experience or maybe something that it’s actually like a pain point in your life because it makes that idea hit harder even if the tech is simple.”
Instead of looking outward for a grand, abstract idea, look inward. Your own frustrations are a goldmine for your next winning project.
3. Non-Technical Teammates Are Your Secret Weapon
A rookie mistake I see all the time is stacking teams with as many hardcore coders as possible. This is a critical error. The most successful teams are diverse, and non-technical members are often the key to victory. As Martin notes, you want diverse teams in a hackathon “for a reason.”
Their role is vital. While coders build the engine, it’s often the non-technical members—designers, business strategists, or domain experts—who must pilot the ship. The best teams empower their least technical members to lead the shaping of the presentation. Why? Because they are perfectly positioned to “calibrate the message,” ensuring it’s understandable and compelling to a broad audience, including the judges. This is crucial because, according to Mercer-Mettl’s guide, projects are evaluated on criteria like “Business value,” “Market potential,” and “Presentation skills,” not just technical execution.
The most effective teams don’t just tolerate their non-technical members; they empower them. Telling a compelling story about your project is just as important as the code that powers it.
4. The “Best Tech” Rarely Wins on Its Own
It’s easy to assume that the team with the most technically complex or groundbreaking solution has the win in the bag. From my experience, I can tell you this assumption is flat-out wrong. A brilliant technical achievement, on its own, is not enough.
Martin shared a perfect example from a CERN OQI hackathon in Lebanon. One team created a “surprisingly innovative algorithm” to solve a deeply important problem: how to bring emergency vehicles to the heart of slums. The algorithm was so impressive it had the potential to become a formal publication. But they didn’t win. They spent so much time perfecting the technical details that it came “at the expense of all the rest.” They failed to effectively communicate the project’s broader impact, its connection to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the soft skills that the judges were also grading.
A hackathon isn’t a science fair. It’s a test of innovation, communication, and execution under pressure. The final pitch is what brings it all together. You must balance technical achievement with a clear, compelling presentation that addresses every single one of the judging criteria.
5. Think “Minimum Viable Product,” Not Finished Product
The intense time pressure of a hackathon creates a strategic dilemma: do you over-scope your project and fail to deliver a working demo, or under-scope and create something that feels unambitious? The solution is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This framework is the perfect antidote to the classic hackathon trap: building too much and finishing nothing, or building too little and impressing no one.
An MVP is a version of a product with just enough core features to be usable and gather feedback. It’s not about building a polished, finished application; it’s about proving your core concept works. Eric Ries, who popularized the concept, defines its goal perfectly:
“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product a team uses to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
This framework aligns directly with practical hackathon advice. Shantanu advises teams to be “ruthless about prioritizing” and focus on building a “proof of concept” or a “minimum working example.” Adopting an MVP mindset allows your team to effectively demonstrate its core idea within the tight time constraints, which is exactly what judges want to see: a functional, valuable idea, not a perfect but incomplete product.
Conclusion: It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Launchpad
So, the next time you’re prepping for a hackathon, don’t just think about your tech stack. Think about your strategy. Winning your next hackathon isn’t about out-coding the competition; it’s about out-strategizing them. These aren’t just tips; they’re the difference-makers I’ve seen separate winning teams from the rest. The real secrets are to focus on the experience over the prize, solve problems you actually care about, build a diverse team, tell a great story, and deliver a focused proof of concept. Success in a hackathon is about so much more than what you can build in 48 hours; it’s about what that experience launches for you next.
Now that you know the real playbook, what personal problem will you choose to solve at your next hackathon?
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