How to organize your hackathon: A comprehensive guide

Introduction

Over the past decade, I've experienced hackathons from every angle organizing, sponsoring, participating, and even winning. This experience has shown me countless approaches to running these events, highlighting effective strategies, crucial decisions for goal prioritization, and the incredible connections they foster.

However, organizing a successful hackathon is challenging, and practical guidance is often scarce unless you hire expensive event organizers. While professional services have their place, this guide is designed for those who prefer a DIY approach or want to refine their existing methods. Whether you're a first-time organizer or looking to elevate your next event, this comprehensive blueprint will help you navigate the process.

Why You Should Organize or Join a Hackathon

Companies organize hackathons for a variety of reasons. Some aim to discover new talent, while others seek to generate innovative product ideas internally. However, the primary motivations often include enhancing public relations and marketing efforts, as well as testing dev tools to evaluate the quality of documentation. Hackathons also provide an opportunity to improve the developer experience and identify new teams that can leverage your dev tools to create products, which may eventually become customers.

Regardless of your motivation for organizing a hackathon, the first step should be to establish OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for the event. This will ensure that everyone on your team is aligned on the primary goals and that your event plan is set up for success.

What to Expect

Hackathons generally follow a structured format, beginning with initial planning and concluding with post-event follow-up. In this blueprint, I've aimed to cover every aspect to guide you through the necessary steps and their execution. Throughout, I've included personal tips on execution. Some of these may not suit everyone or might seem too "business-heavy," such as cold messaging. While I understand this perspective, I assure you these strategies are effective. Ultimately, your goal is to fill the event with participants, and any approach that helps achieve this is valuable.

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The Hackathon Blueprint

I. Pre-Event Planning

A. Define Objectives

Clearly outline your goals:

• Encourage innovation within specific technologies.
• Educate participants on new or existing technologies.
• Boost networking and collaboration opportunities.
• Promote broader awareness and adoption of technologies.

Choose your funnel carefully:

You either focus on top or bottom. This is a very important step also that depends on your OKRs. Do you care about people getting your eyes for the first time on your tools or are you looking to get new customers.

• Top funnel: Attract as many developers as possible for wide-ranging feedback.
• Middle/Bottom funnel: Aim for high-quality participants, especially entrepreneurs or startup teams who can utilize your technology strategically.

Regardless of your choice, the core strategy remains consistent. However, you should explore partnerships that closely align with your developer or user persona. Once participants have registered and your venue's capacity is exceeded, account for potential no-shows. Typically, you can expect an attendance rate of 20-50%, influenced by the strength of your brand. This allows you to categorize participants according to your specific focus at the very end.

B. Organize Your Team

Build a dedicated team with clear responsibilities:

• Event Manager: Oversees all activities and ensures everything stays on schedule.
• Sponsor Coordinator: Engages sponsors and manages partnerships.
• Marketing & Social Media Coordinator: Promotes the event creatively to drive attendance.
• Volunteer Coordinator: Ensures smooth event execution with volunteer support.

C. Venue Selection

Consider carefully:

• Choose between in-person, online, or hybrid based on participant needs.

The type of hackathon that works best for your brand depends on your specific goals and circumstances. Generally, a hybrid format should be considered a "last resort" if planning started late and you want to maximize participation. It's usually better to choose between in-person or online formats.

In-person hackathons are ideal for building high-quality connections and networking opportunities, providing a significant PR boost. However, they tend to be more costly. New brands often find it easier to host in-person events, which can later evolve into strong online communities. Sponsoring a larger hackathon before organizing your own is often recommended to gain initial community advocates.

Online hackathons, on the other hand, tend to attract more participants, although engagement levels may be lower compared to in-person events. Despite this, they can yield substantial benefits similar to in-person events. I recommend experimenting with both formats to see which best helps you achieve your OKRs, allowing you to refine your approach for future events.

• Ensure excellent tech infrastructure (reliable internet, power, streaming capabilities).

One of the most critical aspects you must get right is ensuring a reliable internet connection. This cannot be emphasized enough. Despite working with numerous companies that assured me of their internet capabilities, issues still arose, even when opting for the most expensive packages to guarantee excess capacity. To mitigate this risk, consider having a few Starlink units as a backup and conduct a thorough stress test of the internet quality a day before the event.

• Make accessibility a priority (transportation, accommodations, disability access).

D. Hackathon Format

Select an event length and team size that fosters productivity (usually teams of 3-5, with events lasting 24-48 hours).

E. Select Mentors and Judges

Invite experts such as:

• Industry leaders for credibility.
• Technical experts for hands-on mentoring.
• Entrepreneurs who provide practical business advice.

F. Sponsorship

Approach suitable sponsors:

• Identify tech companies aligned with your hackathon’s theme.
• Secure attractive prizes from sponsors to motivate participants.

G. Promotion

Strategically promote your hackathon:

• Engage audiences on social media with creative, meme-inspired, and engaging shorts.
• Use high-performing social media content as targeted ads locally.
• Collaborate with relevant developer communities and groups.
• Cold email targeted developers using tools like OpenQ to build curated attendee lists.
• Cold message developers directly via LinkedIn with personalized invitations.
• Leverage newsletters and announcements in local tech meetups.
• Host interactive webinars or workshops leading up to the event.
• Offer referral incentives for registered participants.
• Use gamified registration tactics such as competitions or quizzes.

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II. Participant Registration

A. Design Registration System

Use a clear, user-friendly online platform to streamline registration and communication.

There are numerous options available for managing participant registration. One approach is to collaborate with a hackathon organization platform that provides comprehensive services, including event registration, challenge submissions, and judging processes. While many of these platforms include "marketing" in their pricing to boost your hackathon's visibility, be cautious. From my experience running a hackathon organization website, such marketing efforts often result in minimal sign-ups, even with large community networks. Their newsletters tend to have similar outcomes. Therefore, only consider partnering with these platforms if they offer their services at no cost to you.

B. Registration Timelines

Provide clear deadlines, rewarding early sign-ups with incentives or discounts.

C. Team Formation

Clarify team-building rules and provide tools for participants to network and form teams easily.

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III. Hackathon Day(s)

A. Welcome Speech and Instructions

Set the right atmosphere with enthusiastic, clear opening remarks. Introduce mentors, clarify the timeline, and outline event logistics. Make sure you emphasize to participants the importance of prioritizing their presentation over the product, as this is crucial for winning and for judges to easily understand what was built.

B. Idea Pitching & Team Formation

Make team formation fun and easy if teams aren't already set. A method that worked well for us was forming circles where folks could pitch their ideas, and others could raise their hands if they wanted to join or learn more.

C. Coding Begins

Support teams continuously through platforms like Slack or Discord.

D. Mentoring Sessions

Schedule accessible and personalized mentoring opportunities throughout the event.

E. Checkpoints & Progress Updates

Set regular milestones, provide timely support, and encourage teams to share progress.

F. Food, Refreshments, and Rest

Ensure participants stay energized and comfortable with food, snacks, and relaxation areas.

Honestly, when it comes to people reporting that the hackathon was good, it most often just comes back to the snacks and internet. So, make sure you don't save money here.

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IV. Presentation and Judging

A. Team Presentations

Clearly communicate presentation guidelines, provide smooth technical setups, and schedule presentations effectively. If you didn't go with a hackathon platform for developers to send in their projects, I can easily recommend keeping it simple by creating a GitHub repo for the hackathon, telling people to create issues for their projects, and having a general issue template ready so that they can add all the important information to their project info. It's not as beautiful as it sounds, but if you want a nice showcase page, just code it yourself with cursor and query later on the GitHub issues in a page.

B. Judging Criteria

Be transparent about evaluation criteria, including innovation, feasibility, practical application, and technical use.

C. Judges' Deliberation

Allow adequate deliberation time, ensuring fairness and clarity in decision-making.

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V. Post-Event

A. Winners & Prizes

Clearly and enthusiastically announce the winners, making it fun and distributing prizes efficiently (this is also an important review point that people often mention later).

B. Networking

Facilitate enjoyable post-event networking opportunities.

C. Wrap-up & Feedback

Collect comprehensive feedback to continuously improve future events.

D. Social Media

Share highlights, tagging participants, sponsors, and mentors for broad engagement.

E. Thank-you Notes

Send personalized thank-you messages to reinforce connections and convey sincere appreciation. Post-hackathon follow-up is crucial, as it significantly impacts your return on investment (ROI).

F. Project Development Follow-up

Maintain active engagement with developers using CRM tools to track ongoing usage, measure ROI, and ensure continued support and growth.

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Post-Hackathon Strategy

Honestly, when it comes to organizing a hackathon, the biggest mistake I see companies make is that they don't leverage it enough. A generic thank you message is just not enough. Follow up with people. Ask for feedback individually with personalized messages. If your OKRs are about improving developer experience, that should be the goal now to talk to people and see where they struggled. If you are looking for companies using your tools, try to find the developers that work in companies that make sense to approach, and so on. There is a whole article I could write about post-hackathon alone, but most importantly, keep your participants in mind as customers and track them in a CRM.

Use CRM solutions to:

• Monitor ongoing developer activity.
• Assess ROI and event effectiveness.
• Maintain continuous, meaningful interactions and feedback loops.

I know many people involved in organizing hackathons are not business developers, and using a CRM always feels bad and is annoying, so we at OpenQ tried to make it from the UX perspective as great as possible for developers or people with a development background. If you need help, shoot us a message, and we are here to give you tips on improving your post-hackathon game.

Conclusion

I hope this blueprint was helpful in bringing a new perspective and guidelines to organize your event. If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me on social media; my DMs are always open.