Going “full-stack marketer” — how I launched a brand in one week to win a hackathon
When I got the chance to participate in a weeklong hackathon, I decided to challenge myself to go “full stack marketer” and launch an entire brand in one week. Our team won the grand prize at Miami Hack Week along with “Best Use of Open AI.” 🚀🙋🏻♀️😅
I’ve been working in tech for over a decade and I’ve seen a lot of hackathons happen but never attended one myself. They are meant for developers, and even though they say “business people” are welcome, there isn’t an obvious way to plug in, even for product managers!
But it’s a shame you don’t ever see marketers at hackathons because being able to get people to notice your product and communicate the value of what you’ve built is crucial.
So I cleared my schedule to help launch Yentabot at Miami Hack Week. Just like my teammates Ryan Lambert (yes my husband) and Jonah Stiennon, I set an aggressive pace for myself.
One-person marketing team
I did 95% of everything myself. I have some skills in design, so I chose colors, fonts, and logo direction. Built the website, wrote copy, took team photos, etc.
But I couldn’t get the logo where I wanted it to be so Olivine’s Creative Director, Madalena Carneiro, stepped in to help with the logo and color palette. She also helped me polish the pitch deck, but besides that, it was me, myself, and I. I was most proud of my posters, which literally took me all day to design.
Our one-week go-to-market plan:
Product name & domain
Branding: logo, fonts, colors
Team photo & headshots
Website with a form to sign up for the beta
Newsletter on Substack (meant to do this daily but couldn’t pull it off)
Daily podcast on Spotify (very scrappy, recorded in the car!)
Booth posters with tear-off QR codes
T-shirts for demo day
Pitch Deck in case we won Top 5 and got to pitch on stage which I honestly wasn’t expecting, so when I found out we made top 5 at 2 pm, I hustled to a coffee shop with wifi to polish the deck for the 3 pm pitch on stage!
T-shirts to wear in the demo booth & onstage (if we made it that far)
After the hackathon:
It was thrilling to go all in! I didn’t bother asking for feedback from friends and didn’t check to see if I was accidentally copying anyone. I just went as fast as I possibly could with two rules for the brand: no blue and no gradients (I'm so over the typical tech startup look).
In hindsight, the brand looks like Dunkin Donuts (which I can’t unsee), there were a bunch of typos on the website, and my eye was twitching from lack of sleep. BUT I had the time of my life and enjoyed proving to myself that I “still got it”.
About Miami Hack Week
Miami Hack Week brought together top startups, founders, & engineers to build the next big thing in the magic city from Jan 29 - Feb 4th. It’s the third year running and it was inspiring to meet so many builders, not just from Miami, but worldwide!
In total there were 400 attendees, with 146 participants on 60 project submissions.
To our great surprise, we won the grand prize along with “best use of Open AI”. Prizes include $10K cash, Delta flight credits, and tuition scholarships to Draper University.
What does Yenta Bot do?
(This video didn’t get made until AFTER the hackathon.)
Ask @YentaBot questions and get answers based on previous conversations.
Yenta Bot indexes past conversations in public channels that it is invited to. Then it uses that data to answer questions and shares links to the conversations that informed the answer.
Yenta Bot is currently in beta: https://yentabot.ai
The Yenta backstory
Who we are & how we met
The launch timeline
The marketing tech stack
Squarespace: Website and lead form
Figma: Design and branding
Substack: Newsletter
Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor.FM): Mobile podcast creation app
Pitch.com: Pitch deck (templates help A LOT)
Staples: Printed posters for the demo table (quality has improved a lot in recent years)
Linktree: QR Code destination
GoDaddy: Domain
Amazon: Ordered t-shirts
Miami Printed: Local screen printing for shirts
Building up to launch
The posters we had printed at the demo table
The posters had tear-off QR codes & I kept track of the number of installs, users, and questions via a dry-erase marker throughout the day. 💅
I felt good about all the assets I was creating. It’s amazing how fast you can move when you don’t have to build consensus, check with legal, or worry about typos.
My biggest worry was that Ryan and Jonah wouldn’t be ready to install on multiple Slack Workspaces and we’d be in an “all bark, but no bite” situation. Flashy marketing and no product is a big no-no at a hackathon. But of course, they came through and the two ends of the train tracks met in the middle all lined up.
Each night we recorded a podcast episode to recap the day
Demo Day: Installing Yenta for our very first users
Us at our booth (before our shirts arrived)
Pitching on stage with the top five projects
Our pitch deck
The real heroes of course are Ryan & Jonah for building a product that worked beautifully in one week, but we all agreed that the strong marketing played a big role in getting the judges excited at our booth and wowing the audience on stage. I hope to see more marketers at hackathons! Great products deserve to get noticed, and product marketers make that happen.
