The Hackathon Project Dust: Creating Meaningful Impact with OpenQ with Rick Lamanna

Hello. Hello. Hey, how's it going everyone? Real quick, let me let me know if you're listening. Like, hold up your hand if you're listening right now because I feel like a lot of people are hacking right now would like to know who my audience is.

So, hey, my name is Rick. Nice to meet you. I'm the founder of Open Q and this is a talk that kind of connects really well with the previous one. Um, at Open Q, we're trying to help projects like dev tooling companies, Dows, Protocols to engage with their developers. And we started by building like a fully permissionless bounty platform.

And from there we started to understand better what the needs are of these companies and Dows. And one of them was obviously engaging at hackathons and understanding the value hackathons are giving to them. So what this talk is going to be about is like what happens after a hackathon? What are the stats? uh we scraped some repositories from GitHub and I'll show you some data in regards to what the rate of the projects that are continuing after hackathon is and essentially this is very helpful for you on the one side if you want to win prize on hackathon we're going to give you some details in that regard but if you want to build your own developer community we also have some hints for you so this talk is not going to talk about what meaningful impact is that you can create after hackathon or during a hackathon.

I think meaningfulness is quite subjective. Like it could be something positive, it could be something negative obviously like even something like FTX was like on one side like something meaningful because people moved to non-custo wallets or at least a lot of people understood why to move to non-custo wallets. Um and I'm also not going to tell you how to identify a real problem. Like if you're looking for to build something at a hackathon, you should either have a problem based on your own experience figured out that you can build or join a team with people that understand the problem really well and help with executing the solution. So what we're going to talk about is how to kickstart a project during a hackathon and how to grow it into something that has a positive positive impact and then also how to overall improve your experience during hackathon because I feel like a lot of people are participating here and spending a lot of time into coding and making like something really cool but then at the end they don't leverage what they've created.

So, we're going to talk a little bit about what you should do after hackathon to get the most out of it. So, real quick, because I would like to know why most of people are here, like how many of you guys are here because they're looking actually for a job? Like, raise your hands. Actually, nobody interesting. Like, hackathons were used to be built for recruiting in in the original sense like companies tried to attract talents in a very early time.

So, it's cool to see that people are um not looking for opportunities right now and that they have they're happy with where they are. Um so, how many of you guys have an idea and want to build it and maybe also build it into a startup? Cool. How many of you guys are here just to network, have fun, build something cool, and see what's going on? Okay.

And how many of you want to win some prizes? Okay. Gotcha. Cool. So this is the results that we're going to start with and this is all why we're doing this talk.

Essentially we started to scrape from all the major hackathon projects that came out like from Eve Global, Eve Denver, all the smaller hackathon organizers. We started to scrape all the repositories and we tried to understand what is the continuation rate. So, how many commits does a hackathon have like does a hackathon project have like after the hackathon and how does it slow down and how many commits do projects have on average after like 30 days or even 6 months and the results are pretty clear like most of the hackathon projects essentially are stopping and they're not continuing and you can see this by essentially with a rate of 3% um of projects after 6 months that still have a commit in the repository. Now obviously there's like the two factors here that we cannot account for. One is that projects change the repository like people learn something they build something new and then they take that knowledge and implement it into another project.

So that's obviously something that we cannot account for and then also a lot of people think they need to close source the project and they cannot make it public the the work because they are afraid that people will steal it. Not a big fan of it but I respect it. So those are two things that we cannot account for but we're trying to at least figure out how we can implement these type of models as well in the future data sets that we can learn about. And quite interesting enough there's also a research in web two hackathons that was scraping data from death posts and the data is very similar to web 3. So you might think because web 3 has actually a bigger price boo overall that there may be more people willing to put in more extra hours afterwards, but it's actually quite the same.

And if you compare it, web 3 has actually like last year a price pool of around 16 million and web 2 around like 12 million. So you see there's a lot of more money in web 3, but it doesn't change the incentive for people to continue building. So now question is is this bad? Is it bad that after 6 months only 3% of the repositories are still building? And I would argue no.

Like people don't go to a hackathon to build a large open-source project that will be used by thousands of people right away. Obviously that's like a cool thing to do later on. But the initial thought is just learning something, hacking for fun, meeting cool people, and then potentially building using this knowledge that you acquired into a new project. So it's not something bad but what this talk is going to be about is like how can we at least increase the impact that these type of hackathons have because obviously if a lot of projects are not going to be continued on like all these 97% of the projects will crumble to dust and this is what this is going to be about I'm trying to understand can we do something here to get more value out of these and also to make some positive contributions in the community. So what are the major contribu project continuation factors?

So shortterm we found out that it's mostly that people prepare before hackathon like they have already an idea, they have maybe a good team, they know the people that they're hacking with. If you have this type of setup, you're very likely to continue the project at least on a short-term basis and see that you can clean it up at least make like a good documentation and a read me on a GitHub repository and have like something deployed on Versel or Heroku or some something like that. So people can like check it out. Long-term continu continuation is actually most of the time going back to the point how well the team's skill and knowledge is diversified. So if you're a developer and you code with like five other developers at the hackathon, it's very likely that you're missing the skills to bring this to the next step like business skills.

Like for example, if you want to raise funds or if you want to build out this into a serious projects like you need to have somebody that can help you with all of that stuff also marketing becomes an important factor. So uh diversification of skill sets is very important and that's also something that you should look out for if you're building something that you want to bring to the next level after hackathon to actually find people that help you and that uh actually have complimentary skill sets. And the other factor that a lot that's very important uh especially in short-term continuity is like winning a hackathon prize. Um now this is quite controversial. Um I've been participating at hackathons for around 10 years now and I've won almost in every web 3 hackathon a bounty.

Um there's some certain strategy if you want to win at hackathons and it's something that probably not a lot of people uh are telling you but most of most of the sponsors or judges are going to tell you that you have to you know make your presentation really well. You have to understand the problem and come up with an innovative idea. But if you really want to win money you look you need to look at it from a statistic statistical approach. So essentially you need to look at all the bounties and you look at the value and you need to understand where is the most competition and that's exactly what you're not going to do because if you have a bounty that like essentially everyone here can integrate like a wallet connection or like any protocol that can be integrated by everyone then you have a lot of competition and that's obviously for you bad because then it's that you're not less likely to win something. So a little story here.

The last hackathon that I won was actually in Lisbon and we were building something for two days and we were continuously getting feedback from the sponsors which I also highly encourage you to do whenever you're building something at hackathon and we understood pretty fast that they were not interested in what we're building and that we're not going to have a chance to win the bounty. So what we did is essentially at Saturday evening we went for burgers and we kind of thought that we were defeated and built stuff um for fun but didn't get anything out of it. We weren't even motivated to finish it, to submit it. And we just took a last chance and looked at the bounties that were up there and we realized that there was one particular project, I don't want to name it, which one was now that will probably have nobody that will submit on it. And we took this bet and we essentially coded 50 lines of code for a project in a m hour like 4 hours because documentation was very shitty.

We had to understand how to use it was mo mostly just debugging it and unfortunately the sponsors were not there after like 10 p.m. anymore. So we had to figure these things out ourselves and we submitted 50 lines of code and in the end exactly that happened what we expected. Nobody was submitting something that was remotely using this type of technology and we won 5k.

And the funniest thing is that this hackathon the main prize had less money in the pool than this bounty. So we won way more money by doing something with much less effort because we competed with nobody. So if you're here to build something for fun, if you have a specific idea, I encourage you to follow that. But if you're here to really win something as well to get like a kind of return of investment, then I would like encourage you to look at the bounties that you see and look and kind of understand which one is the less competitive to join. And then obviously this is still a very important factor is you need to make a really good presentation.

And there's a real a little trick that you can introduce to your presentation that a lot of people especially judges from sponsored bounties will uh highly appreciate is when you explain how you're going to continue on the project after the hackathon because that's what they're looking out for. They're not looking to give a project that builds something with that technology like some money and then they leave and they never, you know, care about it anymore. If you tell them specifically what you want to do after the hackathon and and obviously you know don't lie like tell them what you plan afterwards then you're gonna have a very high chance that these people were more likely to support you because they feel that it has a higher value to the ecosystem and that's what they like all care about. They don't care about like the numbers of projects. They care about how many projects are continuing after the hackathon.

how many parts are going to integrate our solution and we'll create huge volume using their protocol so that they will you know grow in TVL. So raise your hand if you would actually like in this meme here go to the right side and not clean up your codebase after the hackathon. So who is cleaning code bases after hackathon? Raise your hand. Okay, it's like three or four people.

So not very much. That's actually I think one of the most important pieces here about this talk. So since we've been scraping all these repositories and we've been playing around a lot with the data that we get, I was like very very sad when I saw like all these showcase pages and almost 90% of the projects didn't even have like maintained their deployment on Versel or Heroku. Like most of the projects I had to build myself. I had to clone the repository.

you have to understand how to deploy it myself and I needed to test it and a lot of times obviously then it don't even work anymore like the codebase is not properly cleaned up afterwards which is understandable but I want to kind of give you some like food for thought why you should do this essentially a lot of you guys will build out a portfolio and this is more like for younger people here and having a hackathon project in your portfolio especially if you have multiple ones that people can actually check out when you're in a recruiting phase is like something really really good because you can show what you're able capable to uh to do in like a very short amount of time. So I would highly encourage you to clean up your code base and not only for that reason but actually a lot of open source projects start out not by somebody building something and maintaining it but actually somebody building something and then somebody else picking it up and continuing on it. So when you're building something at the hackathon and the repository on GitHub it has like a couple stars and people will find it. it will give like a lot of potential for other developers to use this and to play around with it and I'm always using the kind of mantra like ideas are cheap. So whenever I build something or before I build something I'm looking at GitHub to see if somebody else has built it to kind of understand how they thought about implementing this and it would be just better if all of these code bases would be like probably cleaned up so I can test and play around with it.

So I think this is very important. this will create a positive contribution just because you know there are much more um implemented ideas um accessible to people and one more reason to do this and this is an example from the AI space that happened a couple months ago. So Sharief is the founder of Lexica which is like an indexer uh for Images on Discord and he wanted to create something where you can index like prompts for AI images and he was had actually his own startup and was building like at the hackathon weekend hackathon this project called Lexica and we was afterwards cleaning it up and making a launch on Twitter and the craziest thing happened afterwards like after uh essentially 12 hours he served nearly 100 gig gigabytes of images per hour for the site project that he built at a hackathon and this essentially turned his startup into like a pivot using this weekend hackathon project. So he had like you know months of work in his previous startup idea which was also something in eye and he essentially used this hackathon project as a way to pivot the startup and after a couple weeks he gained like around 1 million users and that helped him to raise over 5 million in in VC capsule. So this is clearly showcasing that obviously you know this is a unique case.

I'm not saying this happens to everyone. Like also, you're not going to get to hackerank first one page every time you're launching something, but this can happen. And even if it's like just 50 people checking it out, joining a discord server, giving you feedback, and telling you that this is something helpful, I think it's very worth it to to go through it. So now switching gears a bit and talking about developer relations again. So what we at open Q are doing is we we're looking at this funnel here.

We're trying to understand how sponsors are essentially dealing with developers. How is the interaction between it? And we found a pattern that is essentially very similar to every other DAO or protocol or dev tooling company to essentially bring these developers from hackathons and turn them into advocates. Okay. So essentially the process here is and we see this top tornado here is sponsoring hackathons being at tech meetups um creating educational material.

Those are all the things that start bringing awareness about your tech technology. Now the one thing that we found out is that a lot of companies are really good at the top side of this tornado or funnel. I don't want to call it a salesunnel because we're here we don't like these type of wordings but it's essentially what it is. And a lot of people are very bad at the bottom funnel. So what you heard at the previous talk about superfluid, they are really really good at the bottom funnel with everything they do.

But if you look at the larger market in web 3, a lot of people are not really well good at it. And one reason for this is actually in my opinion because they have a lot of money and they were essentially just chilling on the grants that they had and were telling people well if you want to build apply for a grant and we'll make it happen. And this is something I think that had overall a very negative aspect or feeling to to developer relations because everybody was essentially just going like I'm going to integrate you but only if you're going to give me money. If I don't get the grant I don't care about you. And this is what happened like a lot of times and it was certainly not sustainable but everybody had to play with it because everybody else is doing it and if you don't do it you're not going to be able to compete with them.

So this is what happened in the last couple years and you see now that this model is changing and I I wouldn't say particular it's because of the bare market but you see the first grants programs that are being shut down now um I don't want to name who but you probably already heard about like some big layer 2 shutting it down now and they're focusing more on like an accelerator so like going the path like VCs are doing for like equity deals or token deals instead of giving the money for free but they also focus a lot on like vouchers coupons like that type of stuff that you also know from AWS that they give you like 5,000 AWS credits if you start building on AWS. These are the things that like layer ones or or DABs or protocols are also turning into. And I think this is also the direction that it should go into because giving away money for free is not sustainable. It doesn't help projects that don't have that doesn't have raised capital because they have to compete with these people. So essentially we have a talk at uh shelling point about the future of grants.

Feel free to join in. But I think one of the major points here is that we need to rethink how grants are being spent. And we need to especially measure and understand what how we kind of make positive investments into these projects. They're not just interested into using the money to integrate something, but how can we support them in other ways? Because I'm sure a lot of you guys uh want a bounty or submitted the project and they didn't hear back from the sponsors like weeks later.

They didn't get like support. They didn't get like questions like do you need help with anything that we can do like marketing? Do you need some brainstorming? Can you help you to give you some feedback? Like these are the things that I want to have as a developer is building something.

I think that's what we need to focus back instead of like saying write a proposal and get money. So this leads into the last point uh essentially what we're doing with open Q and how we're trying to increase the project continuation at Eve Denver. So first of all something that we're very excited about this year Eve Denver is going to distribute all prices uh via our open cure smart contracts. So essentially this means that for the first time we have like a web 3 native way to distribute prices and that we have also requirements um based on the people that can claim a price uh for example like regulatory compliance if you need to you know add like a tax form or anything to it. So very excited that this process you know will be very seamless.

you won't have to wait as long for the prices as the last years and you will have a very easy way to kind of understand how can I get my money. But the even more important part and that's becoming very interesting for sponsors but also for you is that we're helping all the sponsors to figure out which projects are still active and we're doing this by data mining GitHub. So essentially, if you're planning to build out your project, sponsors will get notifications of your progress on GitHub and we will even reach out in their name for you and ask you if you're not building, if you need any help. And we're essentially simplifying this whole defil process here for them. So after you've done, you're going to get a link via email or you can see check out our documentation open.

dev and we're going to show you how to claim your prices. But this essentially will become the next step for us to also create reputational adapters around hackathons. So people can you know generate NFTTS and other things that are related to your hackathon contributions and also related to like winning a hackathon. So yeah, thanks everyone for listening and I wish you a beautiful weekend here at Eve Denver. [Applause]