Small Startups should go to Small Collegiate Hackathons

Between March and April of 2025, I went to three hackathons as a representative of the startup I currently work for. As someone who grew up around hackathons and fell in love with computer science through it, I've been big advocate of those events. The startup I am currently at is pretty small, at the time only 5 employees including the founders. But we had a product and a platform, and we were gaining traction too, so I felt like it was a good time to spend some of their funding round on going to a hackathon.

What hackathon though? What was our goal from even going to these events? My pitch to my team was the following, our platform is in a refinement phase, and we need to test out our APIs in how effectively can developers understand our documentation and build their end productions from it. Hackathons then became the best place to people watch a group of developers who have a wide range of skill levels interface with your application.

What we wanted to do at each event was to be able to present our product, both pitching at our table and giving a workshop on more in-depth usage; get feedback from developers and get a little bit of marketing material and potential interns from students who successfully build something on-top of our APIs. That means we had to go to events that let us host a prize, give a workshop and table at the event.

Our budget? $6000.

$6000 at an event at [big name school] would maybe get you a table among the 100 other companies that show up. It didn’t seem like a good deal to us. When I was in college, I ran my own event, HackMerced and knew plenty of other schools that threw their own events that had around 250-500 students but had sponsorship packages between 1-3,000$ that could give us everything we needed.

I found three event that could give us what we wanted with our budget, HackDavis, DiamondHacks and HackMerced. HackMerced, of course was a little bias, but you gotta make deals where you can. The other two events were both relatively affordable and let us meet with hundreds of students and have a very successful hackathon run.

Success for us of course meant:

• Battle testing out software; hundreds of students hitting your APIs at once in ways you may have never even thought of
• Understanding the best way to pitch our product to developers with no background in our specific domain
• Debugging foot guns and bad documentation
• Building rapport with developers early, becoming the go to tool for those starting off

I think these three events really got us that, I posted on LinkedIn about all of them here if you want to know specifics.

For you, fellow startup founder, I would say you should go to these events if you’re thinking about launching an API. You don’t know how much ROI you get out of events like these until you try.

Beyond budget, I’d still advise going small. It may seem appealing to go to the biggest events, but you’ll have more time and energy on impressions on students when you’re in a group of 5 sponsors versus 50, plus the top hackathon participants generally go to other hackathons beyond their home school, you won’t be missing out on coverage there.

Some other tips:

• Come with your co-founder, these events will have students coming at all times to your booth, be sure you have someone and maximize your time here.
• Get a hotel close-by, best walking distance
• Actually sleep, students might be braindead by the end of the event, you shouldn’t
• The last 5 hours of the event will have the most questions about your API
• Bring extra snacks for students
• While cash prizes are an incentive, your submission rate won’t change much by offering something like a prize item instead. Also lots of events discourage cash prizes due to higher rates of cheating.
• Want to find a hackathon to sponsor, just make your way down this list by MLH (Major League Hacking)

More hackathon blog posts soon, thanks for reading.