Reflexion on hackathons — Dmitrii Bushkov

For the last months I participated in several hackathons. All of them I failed, I mean I didn't enter even in a short-list. I can't say that my ideas bad, but most of them lack of innovation in terms of startup metrics. The core criteria for me is TAM, SAM, SOM rather than how cool idea is. It is not a pearl, it is more about business.

TAM (Total Addressable Market): The maximum possible demand for your product or service if you achieved 100% market share with zero geographic or operational limitations.
SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market): The portion of the TAM that you can realistically serve given your current business model, geographic constraints, and product capabilities.
SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): The realistic segment of the SAM that you can actively capture in the short term (usually within 1 to 3 years) when factoring in your marketing resources and competition.

I really like the atmosphere of hackathons: a lot of people with shining eyes building staff. A lot of new cool projects were born on hackathons, but honestly only few are alive 30 days after. Build fast, die fast - is the valley's mantra. That's true, but most of hackathon projects died even never been born, never been presented to real users.

There is nothing unique: after intensive weekend people are coming back to their jobs and there is no more resources (time and energy) to push the product forward. That is the first reason why most of the hackathon projects died in the first 30 days (or less).

Second reason - building a product is a hard work with no guarantee whatsoever. Even more: there is 95% guarantee that you fail in a first touch. Are you ready to make several iteration (pivots) till you find something good enough?

“People do not fail; they give up.”— Henry Ford

I believe hackathons is a great engine for building startup community. It is a sandbox where people can try something new and fail safely. However, after that people have to work on their projects: pivoting, failing, trying again. And we need real success stories - without them nothing won't work.