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as Dawn Breaks A peculiar yet invigorating scene unfolds in the heart of Silicon Valley an AG old ritual of Ingenuity and camaraderie known as the hackathorn beckons the brightest Minds from across the land in a quiet anticipation the venue throbs with the heartbeats of hundreds as the clock ticks the s erupts into a cacophony of key strengths the hackathorn has commen these modern day Wizards armed with laptops and insatiable curiosity dive into the abyss of the unknown embarking on a Relentless quest for Innovation yep the hackathon see at commandbar we pulled this card out of Our Sleeve a long time ago and we've been using hackathons as a catalyst for growth for quite some time and so what I want to do today is walk you through the four four rules that we have for a successful hackathon sales cycle But first you might be wondering why are you here and why are you watching this video well my name is Paul Thompson I'm in the growth team here at commandbar we wrote a blog post on hackathon marketing it's pretty juicy now to save you a little bit of time I have made a quick video to run you through the highlights for sure you can go read that later don't let me stop you but if you want the uh the juicy bits delivered to your eyes and ears then this video is for you so if you've gotten this far in the video and you still don't actually know what a hackathon is hats off to you I commend you for your commitment uh just to give you a recap for those of you playing at home who need a little bit of a refresher hackathons are a multi-day event typically where teams come together and they solve either a software or a hardware problem based on a certain objective it's all about collaboration in a time constraint working on a particular problem and there's usually a winner at the end so the next question is naturally well how did command bar get tied up with hackathons I like where your head is at see in the blog post we cover the origin story of commandbar and hackathons I'll give you the real quick recap now we came out of ycombinator and we were very early about a month or two old and a YC Alum was in a unicorn company and wanted to use command bar for their hackathon they reached out to us we got very very excited and we threw everything we had at them thinking that we would turn them into a customer after the hackathon now while we didn't eventually turn them into customers they did win the hackathon and from that spurred this new little go to market growth Playbook that we have coined the hackathon sales cycle uh Playbook and there are four main rules and that's the point of what we're talking about today and if you can take these rules and Implement them and get your app used in a hackathon then I think you're going to be in a pretty good position uh to leverage that well you might be thinking that's all one good Paul but we're just a tiny itty bitty little app and no one's really going to use us in their hackathon well we thought the same thing which is why we've developed this little cu the Spy music this little sneaky tactic that you can take as well see what we did was reached out to Engineers not actually our Target customer per se but the people who were going to be competing at these hackathons and we sent them a little email saying that hey if you want to use command bar uh we're here to support you and and we can give you basically a winning golden ticket app in a box reach out to us and have a chat from there we had a ton of inbound replies coming which set us up for rule number one create a slack channel to increase communication bandwidth a good hackathon only works if you have these two things in play number one you must have a channel where the team can reach you to solve bugs and get through problems really really quickly and efficiently and number two you have to be able to guide the team's implementation to focus on the things that give value and matter rather than the big shiny things more on that a little bit later we actually treat this as a fair Dink and Bru we do not allow people to use command bar in hackathons if they do not have a channel set up with us which kind of sets us up for the next rule which is rule number two shape the buying Journey before the madness even begins you see before the hackathon you have a ton of Leverage right they really really need you after the hackathon when all the dust settles you're almost an afterthought so what we do is we like to make it a condition that when you use command bar in your hackathon that we want a meeting with an executive set up after like maybe a week after the hackathon has finished now you might think that oh geez that sounds pretty pushy I wouldn't be caught dead doing that but we've not had any push back yet and it's a wonderful opportunity for us to kind of continue the conversation and kind of shape that buying Journey even more rule number three is push the most valuable use cases even if the team doesn't actually like it too much now I alluded to this a little bit earlier but everyone wants to focus on the shiny bells and whistles well that might not always be the best option for you as the company or even for the hackathon let me explain a super fast command pallet with shortcuts for power users makes for an awesome demo but often the flashiest features aren't the ones that someone will eventually pay for so during hackathons we steer teams to build features that deliver value to users rather than the ones that just look the shiniest or the best these could include connecting their help center to command bar writing up commands for hard toin settings or even creating nudges and checklists and Rule Number Four craft the presentation on value not just the wow factor the hackathon presentation isn't just an opportunity to show off what was built it's also the chance to make your case to the entire company about why you should be used after the hackathon and how to create value for the whole company not just the team implementing the project so we always offer to help with presentation templates for our teams that can help them showcase how commandbar can move metrics that actually matter for their company things like user conversion user retention and ticket deflection for example now hackathons come in all different shapes and sizes and you've got to weigh out whether your app or tool or company is a good fit for a hackathon and if it is then do yourself a favor head over to our blog post at commandbar docomo blog type in hackathon and have a read through the post there is a bunch of examples in there a lot of little Snippets of our slack Channel some screenshots of conversations that we've had um we talk you through a lot of these rules in much greater detail if you found this video all the blog post and the examples helpful don't be shy reach out to us on socials and let us know how you went uh being implemented or featured in a hackathon I'd really love to hear some of these success stories all right team till next time bye