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YC Hacks Submissions

ychacks.challengepost.com

67 pointsCSDude16 comments

It was fun participating. YC Hacks was my 141st hackathon I've attended and the 111th I've competed in. We didn't win this (can't win them all), but we had a lot of fun. I can't wait until the next one. It was generally well ran for a first hackathon.

What I'm happy to see is that technically novel hacks won and not just hacks that are viable business ideas. (A javascript framework won a spot!)

Being a YC ran hackathon I wasn't sure what to expect. Far too many hackathons have turned into not being about doing something fun and technically impressive but rather mini-investment pitch sessions. There is a place for that but it's quickly becoming a bit silly. I love hackathons where you are judged by peers for the clever technical creations you create. I don't like hackathons where you are judged by sponsors, mostly for using their APIs (it's great to have sponsor prizes but that shouldn't be the reason for a hackathon in many cases).

One thing that got me was the amount of press around this hackathon. The outside world was watching it and you could feel it. It don't think anyone cared internally though that was hacking. It was just as relaxed as any other hackathon I've attended.

My wish list YC Hack next year:

- make it 48 hours (24 hours is almost too short and any longer than 48 is too much in my experience)

- less distractions (too many announcements. it was good at night though, but the music, while good, was too loud to speak to my teammates at points)

- do mini/fast pitches instead of floor demos. we were assigned a table outside and not many people came out there in the hot sun to see our hack. part of the fun of making something in the weekend is showing it off.

- keep it about this size. don't grow it. the lottery and pre-submission was the right idea. if you have to many projects, it gets hard to demo and goes on for hours (See TC Disrupt). The quality of apps was super high here because of the pre-application process.

Everything was amazing though. I would say it's in the top 10 hackathons I've attended of the 141.

Thanks most of all to Kat for organizing this thing. It was awesome.

Interesting. I was normally quite happy at past hackathons that we only had 24hrs. (Startup Weekends or similar are different of course) But my general impression was that you can't build more than a PoC in most cases and thus 24hrs tend to be quite sufficient. With >24hrs you often end up in implementation hell and while that is the time required to also be able to properly prepare the business side of your pitch, it is most often wasted. At the last hackathon I attended (& won), we went from idea to PoC in ~12hrs (of 24h)...

Out of curiosity, what's the best hackathon you've been to?

I wrote this on my mobile phone. Sorry for the grammar and spelling. Now that it has been linked around a bit I feel a bit embarrassed. It has been up too long to edit. :-)

I like surge (http://challengepost.com/software/surge-pricing-as-a-service) - Surge Pricing as a Service. Though it is quite niche, it can provide value that companies are willing to pay buckets for. That is, assuming it works. :-)

Thanks for the feedback! Feel free to sign up at our mailing list. For anyone else, more info at http://surgepricing.appspot.com

Thanks :)

The initial version uses the Google Prediction API as the machine learning backend, and obviously some tweaking would need to be done to the model to get it to 99% right, but I'm confident that for verticals like event tickets this service would be very useful. Imagine Coachella tickets not selling out within 5 minutes or a play at a local theater having an automatic discount the night before the show if half the seats are still unfilled.

Can we run through an example of how this works? Let's say I have a website that sells Super Bowl tickets. I open sales at market price of $1999.00. Then, does every time a purchase happen I send you a post event such as:

    {"item": 150242, "price": 1999.00, at: "2014-08-03T12:40:34Z"}

Then when rendering the product I call into your api to fetch the surge price adjusted value `/v1/150242` and get back:

    {"item" 150242, "quantity_left", 48, "surge_price": 2033.00, "original_price": 1999.00, "percent_change": 1.7 }

Yup, that's basically right.

We also have implemented a "real-time" aspect whereby the price can also fluctuate based on the number of users currently viewing/purchasing an item vs. the average number of users usually viewing the item (for example when Outside Lands begins selling their tickets at 10am PST). Other factors taken into consideration (as of now, but more to come) are: inventory_remaining, and profit_margin (i.e. how much you make on each sale).

Call me old fashioned but surge pricing seems like another term for price gouging.

I love the idea behind Gather -- http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25793-gather

They could monetize by allowing certain restaurants and events to purchase priority.

Thanks! We were thinking we'd allow restaurants/places to give out free things (ex: one free shot at a bar) to incentivize people to go to certain places.

Would also like to implement finding facebook/eventbrite events in the future :)

That's awesome. Monetization and incentivization will be a huge draw for the app.

I look forward to trying it out.

What if the restaurants/events/clubs "pitched" for that group? So if you had a decent sized group willing to spend and they were having a quiet night, they might offer you a free bottle of wine with dinner. A competing restaurant might offer 2-for-1 meals or a welcome drink.

Restaurants and venues could gain some additional traffic for off-peak hours using these incentives -- sort of a late-night happy hour that requires the group to check-in through the app. Pretty smart.

And I think it's inevitable that an attractive or high-spending group would receive favourable "bids" from venues. That's happening already in club queues around the world, but at least this way you might waste less time waiting or at least get better treatment at a second-tier club than be snubbed at the most popular spot. Ugly reality of trends in that world, maybe.

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