How to Win Hackathons: A Complete Guide from 36+ Victories
How to win hackathons, in the seven phases I learned across 50+ events and 36+ wins: from picking your team to following up with people after judging ends.
What Losing Teams Get Wrong
Winning a hackathon is a learnable skill. After 50+ hackathons and 36+ wins, the teams I've seen lose usually made one of four mistakes: an idea too big for the clock, no validation, features that never show up in the demo, or a weak pitch.
50+
Hackathons
36+
Wins
$100K+
In Prizes
7
Phase System
Phase 1: Build a Team With Complementary Skills
Aim for 3-4 people who between them cover these four roles.
Ideal Team Composition
Pro Tip
Solo? Arrive early for team formation. Introduce yourself by what you're good at, not your major or job title.
Phase 2: Ideate Around the Judging Criteria
Read the judging criteria and sponsor challenges before you brainstorm, and pick a real problem you can show working in a demo. If you're going for the win, pick it before the event starts so the first hours go to validation.
Try constraint-based ideation: list the APIs, sponsor tools, and time you have, then brainstorm ideas that use at least 2-3 of them. Dispatch AI came from two combinations in a row. An LLM plus the Twilio API gave us an AI that answers phone calls, and pointing that at public safety made it an AI 911 dispatcher.
Phase 3: Validate Before You Build
Before anyone writes feature code, spend 1-2 hours on these four checks.
Test Your APIs
Call every external service you plan to use. Check rate limits, auth, and data format.
Scope the MVP
List the minimum features the demo needs. Cut the rest.
Check for Prior Art
Search Devpost for this hackathon's past winners, and skip ideas that already won.
Draw the Architecture
Sketch how the pieces connect, then split the tasks.
Phase 4: Execute With an MVP Mindset
Build the minimum viable demo first: the 2-3 features you'll show judges in the pitch. My default stack for that is Next.js, Python with FastAPI, and Supabase or Firebase.
Watch Out
If you're going for the win, use a stack your team already knows, and save new frameworks for a hackathon where learning is the goal.
Best Tech Stack for Hackathons in 2026
My default stack, and when to swap parts of it.
Phase 5: Pitch Short and Leave Time for Questions
When I judged at LA Hacks, each team got five minutes, about 1.5 to pitch and 3.5 for questions, and some teams pitched for all five. Questions are where a judge fills in the rubric categories your pitch missed. Slot lengths vary, so ask about yours.
Open with the problem, then show the product live instead of on slides. Before you walk up, time at least one full run out loud and mark where you'll stop to leave room for questions.
Hackathon Pitch Guide: Full Deep Dive
Pitch structure, the live demo, and judge Q&A.
Phase 6: Polish the Devpost and Demo Video
Judges revisit submissions during deliberation, after you've left the table, so the Devpost has to explain the project without you.
Submission Checklist
Here's our TalkTuahBank demo from HackUTD 2024, where we took 1st Overall. It runs about two minutes, a bit over that target. Watch how early the product shows up and the $200 transfer that happens live on camera.
Demo video by the TalkTuahBank team.
Screen Studio is the screen recorder I use for hackathon demos
Auto-zoom, cursor smoothing, webcam overlay, and export presets that just work. Basically no editing time. Worth a look if you're on Mac.
Affiliate link: I may earn a commission.
Hackathon Submission Playbook
Demo video examples, README templates, and the recording setup I use.
Phase 7: Follow Up Within 48 Hours
Email the sponsors and mentors you met within 48 hours, while they still remember you. Push the code to GitHub with a real README, and post about what you built. That post is how I got my first internship: a LinkedIn post about our LA Hacks 2023 project, which didn't win.
Some projects keep going after the weekend. We won the Grand Prize at the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon 2024 with Dispatch AI, worth about $64K across prizes: a $25K Berkeley SkyDeck Fund investment with a Golden Ticket to SkyDeck Pad-13, $25K for AI For Good, and roughly $14K of hardware for first place in Best Use of Intel AI (devpost.com/software/dispatch-ai). We kept building it, and it's now a company I co-founded.
The Post-Hackathon Playbook
What to post, who to message, and when.
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