Hackathons are the buzz these
days. Techies love it for the creativity
it helps breed. For us, as recruiting company, it provides a great way to
identity talents, do branding & connect our customers with prospective
employees.
We have been co-organizing
hackathons for a while now, primarily focusing on marketing the event for the
main organizer of the event. Recently we organized our first solo event and it
was a grand success. We wanted to share our experience from planning and
executing the event, hoping it would help others. Even if not to organize
hackathon (u can always get us to do one for you J),
we hope the experience helps drive home a very key point! Your ability to do
anything is based on your ability to network and connect with others in your
eco-system! If not for the help of so many, we would not have been able to
conduct such a successful event! This is our ode to all those who helped and
made this possible.
First things first!
First up, here is a list of
things that one needs to organize a hackathon -
- Location with wifi to host the coders
- Food (includiing breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner). A coder with a full stomach is a happy coder J
- Drinks (only the soft variety unfortunately J)
- Tech Mentors (the awesome people who provide a helpful ear and can wip up magic on the keyboard)
- Prizes for winners (Motivation to go extra mile in coding ;))
- Goodies
- List of contests (to keep the techies engaged through-out the day)
- Certificate of participation
- Last but not the least – Techies
We made an estimate to host a
successful hackathon for a group of 150 hackers and it came upto 2.5+ lacs for
the whole event (conservative estimation).
P.S: Hackathons are two day
affair (starts on Saturday and ends on Sunday)
We were disappointed and felt it
is going to be a dream for a startup like ours.
However this did not stop us from dreaming. There should be some solution for this. Here is our journey in achieving the
same. Hope you find it useful in some
way.
First suggestion in cost reduction:
Experts whom I met in multiple
occasions and continued to keep in touch with them suggested that we can
conduct one day Hackathon also.
This brought our confidence backJ.
We also felt if we have sponsors
for few of the stuffs that help in reducing the cost further and also tying up
with such brands gets our hackathon the much needed visibility.
Next Challenge: Saving on Venue / Location with wifi:
While searching for venue, I posted
on my facebook page asking for sponsors for our Hackathon. I got lot of likes
than suggestionsL. Then changed the strategy put the same post
in one of the groups in facebook dedicated for startsups – Bangalore Startup
Connect and one of the suggestion was to check with Thoughtworks, Bangalore J.
How to reach Thoughtworks, Bangalore?
Linkedin. I searched for employees at
Thoughtworks. Found the right contact
and when I approached they immediately agreed to sponsor the Venue.
Cost on Prizes:
While preparing for the hackathon,
we reached out to our existing customers and got immediate acceptance to
sponsor first two prizes from 42Gears Mobility Solutions.
Another thought was to reach out
to creative startups to check if they can sponsor some prizes or goodies and
that is when Giftxoxo came to our thought and they immediately agreed to
sponsor the 1st three prizes and gift vouchers for all the
participants.
Again with great power comes
great responsibility. Sponsors are
coming, so now it is our responsibility to get them good visibility too.
Branding & Marketing:
We reached out to another startup
Invictus - who specialize in digital marketing for branding / communication
part. Yes they agreed to it as it is
win-win situation, they do our communication part and we will include their
logo while branding. We registered a
website for Rs.600 and free hosting (this suggestion I got from our Tech Intern
Abhishek Kumar Gupta just a 3rd
year engineering student of PES.
Initially when I registered for Dexter Talent Labs domain, I paid closed
to 10k for both domain registration & hosting).
Facebook Ad:
We got the initial flier done for
posting in Facebook for facebook ad – it is called boost. Our ad reached very few people – around 500
while we wanted the ad to reach close to 10k.
When we analyzed the data we came to know that the success for facebook
ad is to have few words in the image.
Only image with no workds will surely get you maximum reach. Then we changed our flier to have more images
and fewer words in it. Please note even
the logos of companies with name in it is treated as words only and not image. Again
we went back and this time put only DexterHack without any sponsor’s logos in
it(as logos are anyways it is there in the website). This helped us to get the reach upto 3k
people from 500 initially. It could have
been more if we had time but we found the solution in the last 1 week prior to
the event.
Huge Cost on Breakfast, Lunch & Coffee/Tea:
We were taught to ASK and not
ASSUME when we need something by Mr.Sampath Iyenger (CEO, Blue Tiger). So we decided to give it a try by asking
Thoughtworks for sponsoring lunch and they immediately agreed to sponsor Lunch,
Coffee/Tea. Boom!!! Got little more
breathing nowJ.
Breakfast:
We took quotation from lot of
vendors and while searching for the same thru a family contact I met the owner
of restaurant joint By2Coffee and he immediately agreed to arrange breakfast at
no cost or less cost (still pursuing him to give the bill)
Tech Mentors: The awesome
people who provide a helpful ear and can wip up magic on the keyboard; a very
crucial team who adds to success of hackathon.
How to get them?
Networking: Thanks to our meetup, app fests & our own contacts
from previous companies, we were able to get the best tech mentors. We met them in multiple forums and continued
to be in touch with them thru facebook and when we reached out to them, they
immediately agreed to become our Tech Mentors.
Drinks / Snacks:
Thru just dial we reached out to
the distributors, negotiated with them and got the juices & snacks at
negotiated rate than the market rate. We
were able to save few hundreds here.
Mentor Gifts: We loved to give big gift but again our budget did not
support our wishes. After huge
discussions on multiple options, we got the suggestion to give caricature as
one of the Thank You gift. We felt that
people will like this. Again negotiated
with a creative art startup and got awesome caricature. All of them really liked the gift. Even if it is small it had an awesome impact.
Last Surprise: When all is set is when we got a pleasant surprise
from Nasscom’s 10k startup that they want to become our outreach partner J - what else you need.
In short we would like to say
that organizing hackathon is like organizing a marriageJ.
Now we can organize
any number of Hackathons with ease.
If you try with true
effort, anything is possible. Where
there is will there is a way.
You want to conduct Hackathon? Just drop in a mail to us at janaki@dextertalentlabs.com.
