Why startup founders need to attend hackathons

I was at a recent hackathon organized @social dev camp in chicago. Prachi(@prachisahoo) and I(@bhabanisahu)  attended it for a 36 hours target of building something cool. I had heard about hackathon events , but had never got a chance to get into the experience myself. Having gone through the grueling times in delivering a product for a customer amped up by midnight caffeine power, I shared a whole of the same at the hackathan. However, I believe the experience at hackathon brings in more than what we do on a daily basis.

Let’s say you are an entrepreneur who loves to build something new that the world can use everyday. You have the idea, but don’t have time to build the solution. Or..you have  some time out, but there is a sense of guilt in you that you need to just submerge yourself more in your core venture and not get distracted by new ideas. Hackathon’s for you.

Some plus points from Hackathon:

1. You get to build a minimum viable product in 24-36 hours. Isn’t that cool? You get to discipline yourself in your hiatus of 24 hours and build something that’s been in your mind for a while
2. Because of hackathon you get to arrive a stage in your lean startup lifecycle to validate and iterate on your idea
3. Hackathon gets a good bunch of geeks on board . You get to make some kick -ass connections.
4. At a hackathon, you can potentially have a founder’s dating

You attended a hackathon. Now what?

I have tried to inject a hackathon flavor to our product development cycle @ ventureally and have been noticing some amazing results.We are purely in the “kick butt have fun ” mode.  Our daily /48 hours iterations complete minimum viable products .

Finally , I believe the site hackathonia.com has done a fab job to organize/conduct hackathons!