THE PLAYBOOK — techniques

The Phases page tells you when; this page tells you how the winners actually do it. Chronological: before, during, demo day, after — then the Ten Laws.

PART I — BEFORE

Scout like it's part of the competition (it is)

Past winners of this exact hackathon: organizer taste repeats. Three winners tell you the register — social impact? dev tools? flashy consumer?
Sponsor-prize arbitrage: the grand prize has 40 teams; "Best use of X API" has 6 — half of whom bolted it on in the last hour, and judges can tell. Pick your idea so a sponsor API is load-bearing, and stack eligibility: one build, 2–3 prize tracks, 3 lottery tickets.
Judges shape the pitch: VC → who pays; engineer → one real technical flex sentence; sponsor → their API visibly on screen; professor → correctness and honest limits.
Sleep is the only free performance enhancer and everyone skips it. The 3am you makes scope decisions the 9am you pays for.

PART II — THE GAME

The wow-moment catalog — pick ONE, build the demo around it

PATTERN	THE MOMENT	WHY IT LANDS
Live input	A judge's own words / photo / voice goes in; the product answers	Personal stake — it's their result now
Before / after	10s of the painful old way, then yours in one action	Contrast is the fastest story there is
The instant	Something that "should" take minutes happens in one second	Speed is viscerally legible
It knows me	Output references the judge's university, city, this event	Surprise + relevance
The swarm	One click → many things visibly happen (map fills, feed streams)	Scale you can see beats scale you claim
2nd modality	Voice in, camera in, something physical out	Unexpected input beats fancy output
The counter	A live number ticks while you talk (₹ saved, seconds saved)	Gives the eyes something to believe
The reveal	"Scan this — it's been live on your phone the whole time"	Turns the audience into users mid-pitch

The wow moment is where your reliability budget goes: it gets the seed fallback, the precompute, the most rehearsal reps. A wow that fails is an anti-wow.

Naming & momentum

Name: ≤3 syllables, spelled like it sounds — a tired judge hears it once and can type it. Tagline formulas: "X for Y" · "Verb your noun" · "The [known thing], but [twist]". Same words in the title tag, the header, the README, and your mouth.
10-minute rule: stuck 10 minutes → switch approach or ship the dumber version with a // shortcut: marker. Sunk-cost debugging is the #1 solo-team killer.
2-option rule: never generate five options. Two, pick one, move. Optionality is procrastination in a suit.
Demo-path-first commits: every commit should improve what judges see, or it queues.
The 60% meal: twenty minutes away from the screen at 60%. The 3am refactor urge is fatigue, not insight.
Seed data is set-dressing: 30 minutes of realistic rows upgrades every screen, screenshot, and impression the project will ever make. Cheapest polish that exists.

PART III — DEMO DAY

The 3-minute structure

BEAT	TIME	WHAT HAPPENS
Cold open	0:00–0:20	The problem as a story about a person. No product name, no tech words yet.
Name drop	0:20–0:30	"So we built [Name] — [tagline]." Product appears for the first time.
The flow	0:30–1:30	ONE continuous use, start to finish. Wow lands before 1:00.
Depth flash	1:30–2:30	Second feature + exactly one technical flex sentence.
The close	2:30–3:00	Payoff line → one ambitious next-step sentence → stop talking.

Rehearse to finish at 2:25 of a 3:00 slot — overrun kills the close, and the close is what they score.

Stagecraft & Q&A judo

Slow the mouse — judges' eyes run two seconds behind your cursor. Move like you're teaching.
Silence after the wow: two full beats. Talking over your own wow moment is the most common self-inflicted wound.
Pre-position everything: tabs in order, zoom 125%, notifications off, cursor parked on the first click.
Bridge technique: answer the exact question in one sentence, then bridge to strength.
Honest-limit answer: "it breaks past ~500 concurrent users — that's a caching problem, not an architecture problem." Precision reads as competence; vagueness reads as hiding.
The AI question: own it with the log open — "AI wrote most lines; I directed every one. Here's the timestamped decision trail." In 2026 this answer wins rooms.
Can't answer? "We didn't hit that — here's how we'd find out." Then stop.
Booth mode: loop a 60-second cut, keep something alive on screen (counter/swarm), hook line = the tagline, never the stack.

PART IV — AFTER

The 48-hour harvest

The project peaks in value for 48 hours: record the 60s video, final README pass, keep the URL alive (recruiters click old links — a dead demo silently deletes the achievement).
Post formula: what you built (one line) → the wow GIF → one honest lesson → link. Twenty minutes, compounds for years.
Resume line with numbers: "Built and deployed [name] in [X] hours; [prize / tracks placed / users at demo]."
Lost? The autopsy: which elimination filter did the winner's idea pass that yours didn't? Three written lines. Losing without extracting the lesson is the only real loss.

PART V — THE TEN LAWS

Decide, don't browse. A decided mediocre idea with polish beats an undecided brilliant one.
Deploy before you build. Public URL by 20% of time. Ugly is fine. Deployed is law.
The demo script IS the feature list. Not shown in three minutes = not built.
One wow moment, engineered. Land it before 1:00; spend the reliability budget there.
Ambition in the pitch, execution in the demo. Claim big. Build small. Demo flawlessly.
Seed data is set-dressing. Twelve realistic rows make a prototype photograph like a product.
Ten minutes stuck = switch. Sunk-cost debugging kills more hackathons than bad ideas.
Never pass a red baton. Handoffs start from green — fix or revert, then swap drivers.
Freeze at T-90, rehearse ×3. Finish 20% under time. The close is what they score.
Never say "this normally works." One calm sentence, next beat. Forward, never backward.