My experience at Techcrunch Disrupt

Excitement

When I saw this post come up on my feedly feeds, I was surprised. I have been an avid follower of Techcrunch for a long time and read many articles about cool hacks at previous hackathons. However, when I realized that I could easily participate in this one since it was just a 5 hour drive away, it got me really excited. When I moved to Germany recently, I was looking forward to new experiences but I hadn’t thought that TechCrunch Disrupt could also be one of them! I was thrilled and signed up right away and also spread the word around in office so other folks who were interested could sign up. The tickets were released in limited batches and one of my colleagues did manage to sign up.

Preparation

The next step was to find out more about the hackathon — how does it work, what can be developed, are there any rules, how are the teams formed etc. Devpost proved to be quite useful in answering my questions. Not only did it have the full event listing and rules but also a community board where you could describe yourself and your skillsets, so that you can interact with others who are going to be at the hackathon and team up. Closer to the hackathon, there was additional information about the sponsors and their APIs with the prizes on offer.

I came up with a couple of project ideas that could be worked on during the hackathon but kept my options open on teaming up with others at the event if a particular project seemed more promising. I also had a good night’s sleep and rest on the days leading up to the hackathon so that I could toil through the night. I think the need to have a fresh and energized mind to plunge into a hackathon is often overlooked!

At the event

Saturday afternoon saw us lining up outside the The Arena in Berlin where there were already a bunch of people hanging around. It was interesting to meet people from all over the world — Sweden, Belgium, Poland and even Namibia! Folks from Berlin were probably a small minority. There was some active team recruitment going on where some team leaders had created posters that described their idea and what kind of skillsets they were looking for. Hackathon veterans seemed to come prepared as well — many had got their own screens, keyboards, development devices etc. and I even saw an inflatable bed!

I ended up at a table with my colleague, two business school students from Poland, an Informatics student from Berlin and a freelance software developer from Sweden. We were a very diverse bunch and took a democratic approach to deciding what we would work on. Every person presented his/her ideas and the team collaboratively discussed and arrived at what would be the best projects to work on.

I presented my idea of a chat assistant built into Whatsapp that was well received by other members of the group and what took me by surprise was how I became more convinced as I was presenting it. I tried looking around for someone with familiarity with javascript since this is an area where I have no experience and the library that I planned to use definitely used that. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone at this point but I was convinced enough to decide to create WACAO on my own.

Building WACAO!

I would like to believe that I have a structured thought process and I used some ideas from a recent agile/scrum training that we had at work to list down the main user stories for WACAO. I knew that I had two big use cases that would be most valuable for the user and create the most WOW at the demo — Automatic Translation and Chat Summarization. I decided to break these up into smaller sub-tasks (hello Scrum!) and got down to working through them.

I spent a lot of time understanding and experimenting with the library and getting it to work for my specific use cases. This meant a lot of tinkering around at Javascript objects and Console logs to reverse engineer and get the chat messages I needed. It was slow to progress but the energy levels were high thanks to the constant flow of snacks and drinks that TechCrunch provided. There was a constant sugar rush with donuts, pastries, cakes and juices and amusingly one of the guys at my table had created his own Red Bull intake schedule so that he would be awake through the night!

Taking breaks by going out for a walk, fresh air (though it was really cold!) and speaking to other guys at the hackathon helped to bring an additional perspective and solve issues I would have otherwise been stuck at forever. It was motivating to see others work through the night and this really gave me the energy to not give up and continue creating WACAO. I did take a power nap and I think this gave me all I needed for the final stretch.

The final stretch was the most adrenaline charged part of the event. Every team was racing to finish and submit their hacks before the deadline of 9:30 a.m. This meant gobbling up breakfast while coding furiously and adding screenshots and detailed descriptions to the devpost submission. I also managed to create a funky logo for WACAO using a free online logo service.

The Demo boo-boo

As the clock ticked past 9:30 a.m. there was a visible sense of euphoria around the hall as the hard part was done. The teams took a small breather before starting to prepare for their pitches. Every team is allowed one minute to pitch and demo their hack, so you needed to be crisp and precise in your message.

I practiced my pitch and even timed myself to ensure that I don’t exceed the minute. I was scheduled to present at the 8th slot and was all wired up. It was amazing to see the kind of coordination and event management that TechCrunch puts into these pitches because they had 10 teams setup to go one after the other with seamless switching between their demos — incredible! As it got closer to my demo, there were butterflies in my stomach as it was a long time since I had presented in front of an audience.

As I started my pitch I became more comfortable but then disaster struck! The solution had stopped working and there was no response to the instructions I was sending to the chat assistant. You can see how dumbfounded I was in the video at the end of this article. There couldn’t have been a worst possible time. I had to move back to restart the application and this time it worked but by then I had run out of time and the pitch was ruined. I was disappointed.

It was a solution that worked and seemed quite promising but it didn’t work when I needed it do. The demo gods were certainly not on my side that day.

However, just after we got off the stage, one of the TechCrunch reporters approached us wanting to know more about the idea and to see if it really works. I was able to walk her through the demo once again and this time it worked! I was able to show her how WACAO is able to translate messages, summarize chats and send pre-configured Happy-Birthday messages. She had several questions around how it works, what did we use, how did we come up with the idea and how others could actually use this. And thanks to her, I was also featured on Techcrunch!

Lessons learnt

• Always practice your pitch and demo and have a plan B. I realized that being prepared for every scenario including failure is very important.
• Hackathons are awesome events to meet talented people from different parts of the world with very diverse skillsets and very cool ideas. Some of the other demos that I saw at the hackathon were simply mind-blowing. You can check out the full video here.
• Deadlines work! I had pulled an all-nighter after a really long time and I didn’t know if I still had it in me to do that.
• I’m quite amazed that I was able to achieve what I set out to do and I have more conviction in my ideas now.
• A bit disappointed that the demo didn’t go as expected but happy that I got featured on TechCrunch.

It was an amazing experience and thanks to TechCrunch for putting up an awesome event that was a lot of fun!

For those looking for more information on WACAO, do check out the github page and if you have suggestions on how it can be improved or made more user friendly, please do post your comments.