Hackathon is the event to sharpen your 5 pitches in Real Life

I was eagerly looking forward to my participation at the Ladies1st hackathon, aiming to solve the challenges of the new world of work, a topic that I've been following for a while. On the morning of the event, I had sparkling new ideas in my head but still short of a team. I knew that to find the right team, I needed to deliver a winning pitch.

A hackathon has some great advantages: first, leaving your home and stepping out of your comfort zone to build a team (that you meet for the first time that morning), working on a new technological idea from concept to reality, and of course making new quality connections. Surprisingly, I discovered an additional huge advantage through the 30 hours of the hackathon – Sharpening your Pitch skills as you use them in real life. 

PITCH # 1 – Why Me?  

I didn't get to know the hackathon's participants before the event, most of them were already gathered into teams. So, go ahead! I have a great idea – I need a team! At the morning of the event I pitched live on stage - I introduced the real value that a team will gain due to my participation, my relevant professional background and my soft skills. Equipped with entrepreneurial spirit, we built a team containing also 3 super-power programmers.

PITCH # 2 – Your Idea - Deliver Your Passion!

During ideation and brainstorming process, I pitched my idea to the team. An idea in the field of Lifelong Learning I really believe in. Besides the vision, need, the unique value and business model, I introduced the idea with true passion and enthusiasm. Those who know me know that I breathe ideas [brainstorming is my Life], and I find it very important to pitch any idea with eyes shining. Passion is addictive, and I believe it is the foundation for better performance of all team members.  

As product development process continued, we sharpened our pitch repeatedly. When questions were raised, we had to rebuild the idea, and thus to reconstruct the pitch, delivering the new message. Our pitch leaped into the next stage, the product and message are now sharped!

PITCH # 3 – Written Pitch? Make it Personal

A true need makes the idea into a diamond! therefore we drafted a survey and sent it to people in a career decision junction. We needed cooperation in a short time to get a basic feel of the need. We sent a short-focused message on a personal note explaining the value of the survey. Within an hour (and while eating pizza!) our pitch converted to 30 filled surveys. 

Night, it's getting late, but we still lacked a qualitative feedback from leaders in the field. We [dare to] send a Facebook messages to leading career consultants. The messages were mini pitches, authentic, nice and honest, and to our satisfaction one of the consultants even agreed to speak with us at midnight (!).

PITCH # 4 – Who Am I? My Networking Pitch

During the hackathon I met intelligent people: the event organizers, professional mentors, entrepreneurs and hackathons participants. The pitch should always be customized to the people you met, it describes your unique and spicy story within a few lines, past, present and future – who are you? What is your toolbox combined of? What are your goals? what is the next step? Pitch of life itself.

PITCH # 5 – Why to invest in you? Pitch Deck

at 07:00 am, after transforming the idea into a live and kicking product, hours of work were zipped to a 5-minute presentation before the judging committee. Our story began by sharing the customer’s journey, facing a need to learn constantly in the new world of work. Besides the basic slides of the problem, solution and business model, we showed our live demo to demonstrate the technological feasibility and the idea flow in general. We also shared the vision, the team’s skills, devotion, and how it is the right time to execute on the vision.

At this hackathon I practiced 5 different pitches. Each pitch was challenging and conveyed messages with respect to each situation. The added value in a hackathon is the diversity of audiences, the people you don’t know and curious to meet, the creative thinking behind each message, which needs to be sharpened and renewed fast.

A hackathon is a mirror of the messaging rhythm in REAL LIFE. In any place, in any encounter, we deliver different messages, target oriented, with people we know, or others we don't. it happens everywhere - at work, with your team, management, board of directors or investors. If we practice our messaging and pitches while dealing with challenging questions, we will sharpen the message, and move to the next stage.

This is why we all should experience a hackathon, at least once. It is priceless.