High School Hackathon: How to Prepare a Winning Presentation

Written by Braden Wang

Participating in a Hackathon

When participating in a high school hackathon, what is going to push your product to be above all the others? Is it creativity? Is it the execution of the idea? A clean user interface?

Well actually, it is none of these.

Although these are all important factors in a winning hackathon product, the thing that really sets the winners apart from the losers is always the presentations.

Your Hackathon Presentation

Over the years, I’ve participated in plenty of high school hackathons. At least enough for me to notice a common trend: the best product doesn’t always win. For example, one time a team actually had a fully working app, and the idea behind it was solid.

In fact, I actually wanted to use it myself, and my team unanimously agreed that that team would probably be the winning team.

However, to our surprise, they did not win.

They were still runner-ups, but why did another team win?

The answer was obvious once we had a look at both teams’ presentations. The winning team had a beautiful presentation. Impactful visuals, clean, concise and to the point. Through the slides alone I felt like they had persuaded me that the problem they’re addressing is something that people truly care about and that their product would solve every aspect of it with minimal downsides.

So one team had an amazing product but a mediocre presentation, while the other had a mediocre product but an amazing presentation.

Why did the latter win? Well, let’s take a look at the monster company Amazon as an example.

At the beginning of this company, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon was losing money. He was paying out of his own pocket to keep it running, and investors were suffering a loss. So why did investors stay? Why was the company able to acquire the funds in order to become successful, even though it almost looked like a failure? Well, the answer’s simple: Jeff Bezos convinced them that his company would succeed in the future.

In a lot of cases, it doesn’t matter how good your idea is, or how well your prototype functions. If you can’t convince anyone that it is a good product, no one really cares. This is important in a high school hackathon.

Summary

In summary, if you want to win a high school hackathon competition, treat marketing and presentation preparation with the same value as the product itself.

In fact, I would recommend assigning someone to focus solely on marketing and finding ways to convince the panel of judges that your product is worthy of the top spot.

Of course, the product development itself is still very important. If marketing was worth 5 points, the product itself would probably be worth 7 because it’s harder to convince someone that a product is a good idea if it actually isn’t, but if you neglect marketing like many new teams do, you may lose out on more than a third of your hypothetical points. So, make sure you don’t skip anything.

Assume the judges know nothing. Fit in as much information as possible into your presentation because if it isn’t in the presentation, it may as well not exist.