The Product Hunt Global Hackathon — Join Us! 🌎
I love my job. Every morning, I wake up to discover new, innovative products created by people around the world, like this side project by 18-year-old Amrith in India to this design tool from a team of two in Ukraine. Their creations are inspiring, useful and sometimes hilarious. While not every product may be a “success” in the traditional sense, we know that the process of building and exploring new ideas is what moves our industry forward and something we continue to encourage at Product Hunt.
To further support makers and encourage people to build awesome products, we’re excited to announce the Product Hunt Global Hackathon. 🎉
Unlike traditional weekend hackathons, this will be a month-long event, for anyone in the world to participate online. The event kicks off November 1st. You’ll have the entire month to build something awesome with over $250,000 in prizes awarded to the winners thanks to the support of our awesome friends at AWS, Dribbble, Girls in Tech, Glitch, the Google Assistant, Indie Hackers, Slack, Stripe, and TechCrunch.
How it works
Anyone with a computer is welcome to participate, from solo makers to teams of people. Everyone will get free access to Ship, our new toolkit to help makers build awesome products, to showcase their project, share updates, and gather feedback from the community along the way. You’re welcome to build anything (get creative!) or focus in on one of the following categories:
Social Impact — Technology in the hands of empathetic, thoughtful makers has the ability to make the world a better place. We’re especially thankful for those that contribute to this category.
Blockchain / Crypto — You might feel inundated with ICOs and new blockchain-based startups, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Build something creative in this exciting space.
Augmented Reality — With the introduction of ARKit and ARCore, it’s never been easier to build AR experiences. Let’s turn those crazy ideas we read about in books into reality.
Slack — Slack is one of the most compelling platforms to emerge in recent years. Build a Slack app or integration that teams will love. Slack is giving away two iPhone X’s (or a lunch with Stewart Butterfield! 🍔), an opportunity to pitch the Slack Fund for investment, and Slack swag pack to the winning team in this category.
The Google Assistant — The rise of conversational computing has created new opportunities to change the way we interact with technology. I’m especially excited to see (and hear) what apps you build for the Google Assistant using the Actions on Google Platform. Apps for the Google Assistant are available across phones, smart speakers like Google Home, headphones and more. And, the best part — winners in this category will be awarded Google Homes and a suite of other prizes… stay tuned.
Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning — AI and ML will change the world, and while we don’t expect you to do so within 30 days, this is a fascinating place to explore (or just get started on doing so). The winning team that builds with Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence platform will be awarded $100k in AWS credits (!!!).
The Judges
We have an all-star group of founders, operators, and investors eager to see what you’ve made.
Our accomplished cast includes Michael Seibel (CEO, Y Combinator), Alexis Ohanian (Cofounder Reddit + Initialized Capital), Sophia Mahfooz (COO at Girls in Tech, Inc.), Morgan Beller (Corporate Development, Facebook), Startup L. Jackson (Social Media F*cking Master), Sarah Tavel (General Partner, Benchmark), Matt Sandler (Startup BD, Amazon/AWS; EIR, Techstars Music), Alexia Bonatsos (Writer), Hiten Shah (Founder), Anil Dash (CEO, Fog Creek Software), Justin Kan (CEO of Atrium LTS, Founder of Twitch), Michael Lopp (VP Engineering, Slack), Cyan Banister (Partner, Founders Fund), and Sarah Buhr (Writer, TechCrunch).
At the end of November, the judges will review your projects making their evaluations based on four criteria: whether or not your product solves a true problem, the uniqueness of your solution, the strength of your execution, and the strength of the community you’ve built around your product. Judges will select three overall winners, in addition to category-specific winners, for a combined prize pool of over $250,000 which includes AWS credits, a trip to next year’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Stripe Atlas access, Ship Super Pro account, and a few more surprises.
Join us
The deadline to register is October 29th. We’d love for you to join.
👉 Sign up here
Final Notes
Everyone is welcome to join: the only requirement is that you begin working on a new project instead of adapting previous work or submitting your existing company as a hackathon project. While we encourage you to focus on familiar problem spaces, we’re trusting teams to only submit products built during the month of November. If you have any questions about what’s permissible, just drop us a line.
In our experience, it’s more fun to hack with a friend: if you’d like help finding someone to build with, sign up above and we’ll invite every participant to a Global Hackathon Facebook group where you can introduce yourself to the community and find new friends to work with.
You can use any technology stack you’d like, but keeping with the spirit of collaboration and community, your product must be publicly available for free so everyone can play with it.
While this is an online, global hackathon, we encourage people to meetup IRL and host weekend hack sessions in if inclined. It’s a great way to meet fellow makers and build community in your city. If you’re interested in hosting, please contact Jacqueline on our team here and she’ll help give guidance and promote your event across the Product Hunt community.
Do you or your company have an API or dataset that you’d like to offer to the Global Hackathon community? We’d love to help. Shoot us an email and we’ll get you sorted.
This wouldn’t be happening without the support of some awesome partners. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with each company (if you aren’t already a fan 😊):
AWS
Amazon Web Services provides startups with low cost, easy to use infrastructure needed to scale — from the spark of an idea, to your first customer, to IPO and beyond. Constantly innovating in cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence services, and developer tools, AWS is trusted by the largest enterprises and hottest startups alike.
Dribbble
Dribbble is on a mission to build the world’s best platform for designers to gain inspiration, feedback, education, community, and job opportunities. They serve as the go-to resource for discovering and connecting with designers around the globe.
Girls in Tech
Girls in Tech is a global non-profit focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of girls and women who are passionate about technology. With over 100,000 members, we exist to provide women with a platform for growth, but we operate with the spirit of the girl within all of us — fearless, lively and determined.
The Google Assistant
The Google Assistant allows you to have a natural conversation between you and Google. It’s one Assistant that’s ready to help you throughout your day and is accessible on more than 100M devices including Android and iPhones, Google Home and voice-activated speakers, Android TV, smart home and wearables.
Glitch
Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment — anybody can build a web app on Glitch for free. Here’re some starter apps to help get you up and hacking quickly.
Indie Hackers
Indie Hackers is a community where the makers behind profitable businesses and side projects come to share their stories (and revenue numbers) transparently, and where other entrepreneurs can learn from those examples, discuss their own ideas and projects, and give each other feedback and support.
Slack
Slack takes the hardest part of all our jobs — communication — and makes it simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. Whether you’re collaborating, brainstorming, striking deals, approving expenses, standing up with your team or sitting down with a new client, you can do that all in Slack. Today, more than 9 million people around the world — from Fortune 100 companies to thriving neighborhood restaurants — rely on Slack to bring their teams together, make sense of their work, and drive their businesses forward.
Stripe Atlas
Starting a company can be needlessly complicated — lengthy paperwork, bank visits, legal complexity, numerous fees, and non-obvious decisions about what services to use. Stripe Atlas to make this easy: a tool to handle everything involved in establishing business. Within minutes, Stripe Atlas allows entrepreneurs to incorporate as a Delaware C Corporation, get a signed certificate of incorporation, bylaws, and board consent; IRS Employer Identification Number (EIN); access to your business bank account, a Stripe account and access to the full Stripe product suite; and special offers on startup services. Product Hunt Hackathon participants can skip the line and get instant access to Stripe Atlas here.
TechCrunch Disrupt
TechCrunch Disrupt is coming back to San Francisco in a big way in 2018. As the preeminent global startup event for learning, innovation and networking, you’ll discover hundreds of early stage founders and emerging technologies making their debut! Sign up to be the first to hear about their exciting announcements to come in the weeks ahead at TechCrunch.com/DisruptSF.
Excited? Sign up for the Global Hackathon before October 29th. 😊