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Most of my contact with "Idea Guys" was when I would attend hackathons. Without fail, about half the people there would be marketers or business people that wou
by ryanmcbride 8y ago
Most of my contact with "Idea Guys" was when I would attend hackathons. Without fail, about half the people there would be marketers or business people that would have an idea, and offer to write up the business proposal for the hackathon project, but offer nothing in the way of actually building stuff. When I would work at hackathons I got pretty good at identifying these people and ensuring that prizes went to the people who _actually_ did work past the first 20 minutes of ideation.
- Vinnl 8y agoHeh, my strategy for winning hackathons is the opposite: assign one or two people to a flashy presentation, the rest just go have fun eating and drinking and having some fun playing with a technology you've been eyeing. Prototypes don't win the hackathons I've been to anyway, so might as well let the idea guy do their thing and have some fun yourself.
- ryanmcbride 8y agoIn my experience that only works if the judges aren't engineers, which granted, is more common than it should be. When I worked a booth at a hackathon a few years ago, we had 5 Drones to give out to the 5 best uses of our API. We had a few takers, but all but one made a bullshit project using as many apis of other companies to hedge their bets and increase the prizes they could get, and a lot actually didn't really use our api (they made up data and said it came from ours). None of them had a deployed application, or much more than slides. One team not only focused solely on our API, but bought a domain and deployed a working product. Using our actual data. We ended up giving that team of 4 entry level engineers all 5 drones, because they're the only ones that deserved them. Helps that all our judges were engineers.