How to do the best one can and not to win?

We are a team of engineers from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, we do some cool software projects and enjoy spending our free time participating hackathons. We have won a number of them in Russia and have decided to test ourselves on the international arena. This is an article about our first two hackathons in Germany! 

1) The first one was BE5Hackdays in Technische Universitat Munchen with constructions&materials as a head topic and we were working on the SCHU?CO company track.

Our main aim was to allow skyscrapers owners to reduce their spends on the facade cleaning. We had considered a number of different variants and stopped on the following one:

•  A number of sensors located on the facade and a desktop application displaying all the info.

Light sensors scan an amount of light passing through the glass and send infor to desktop application, which calculates the dirtiness of the whole building and gives a picture per each side. Moreover air pressure sensors allow us to draw wind map and help cleaner choose the right time to clean the side (strong wind is the biggest hazard in skyscrapers cleaning process). In cooperation with weather forecast our system will provide comprehensive solution for the market of cleaning companies.

Some interesting strategic moves I invented and used to increase our chances to win:

1) Having a native speaker in a team.

It's Julian, he is an Austrian architect and at the beginning of the hackathon on Friday he was not too inspired by our ideas but after idea pitches he came and sad: Let’s team up, guys! 

Being a native German speaker he communicated with mentors and judges easily, he perfectly structured all our ideas after brainstorm and at the final he carefully prepared a good pitch.

2) Be flexible, even in the sphere you're a guru.

In our team I am a visioner and I usually present everything, but that time it was just circumstances that Julian was a speaker and I was still a visioner. Sounds crazy but less than an hour before the speech I saw our presentation and was scared. Wrong colors, wrong logic, wrong key points, everything was not as I used to do and present! On a minute I realized that we are going to fail no doubt, I was totally shocked but thinking through the situation soberly moved me to a plan. Julian was maybe not the best speaker, but he knew his work well and he has prepared well, I decided to trust him everything we did, all our efforts and money spend on a travel. I just added some important phrases, changed some colors and "bless" him to win :)

As a result, we won our track! Thanks to everyone who organized this event, thanks Viktor, Raed, Dmitriy and Julian, you're the best!

2. PAXTECH

The second one was PAXTECH hackathon in HAMBURG MESSE with Aviation Industry as a headline. We accepted the Inflight community creation challenge and started researching possible consumer needs.

During our flight from Moscow to Berlin we made a questionnaire and collected a feedback from travelers. It was pretty awesome experience because people were really interested in what we were doing and they gave us a lot of cool feedback. From this bunch of information we calculated the travelers problem:

People want to communicate with their neighbours but they don't know anything about them.

We also offered them to choose or generate some useful functions for our app.

 Then we built a dream team with Dylan -- an IOS dev, Linda as a business expert and Valerie as a designer.

Our main idea was to split plane into networking and classic areas and ask travelers to choose one and add some information for their possible neighbours immediately after buying a ticket. This allows us to use Hungarian graph algorithm to match neighbours perfectly and allows users apply their flight time to do some useful connections.

Because of a big team and a good roles distribution we've covered all tasks and have made both a robust prototype and comprehensive business plan with milestones and breakeven point estimation. I've spent enough time, trained a great pitch and then made a kick ass performance on the scene for judges in spite of some technical troubles at the beginning of our time.

It was the whole best two days hackathon solution we ever made, judges were impressed and we have a cool discussion in the question time.

Unfortunately, guys from "futurice" startup with already done (before) face identification platform and some improvements during the hackathon were chosen as a winner, it is sad because hackathons are not about the startups and you have to build everything from scratch using only open source tools and libraries. It's a pity that not all the judges check this by themselves.

Important rules I've learned from the situation:

1) the end of a speech is not the end of the competition, you have to watch and check all the pitches of your opponents

2) even if you hasn't been chosen as a winner, you should ask judges what was wrong in your solution and pitch and improve this next time

3) you must speak with all judges and mentors as much as possible before and after the pitch to learn maximum info and likely receive some future for your project

Whatever it was I am satisfied that we've made all parts of the product perfectly and it was a positive experience, thanks Dmitriy, Raed, Dylan, Linda and Valery we were the dream team and have done a great job!