How We Survived the 1st Hackathon at Async Labs

At Async Labs, we follow our motto, “We put all our efforts into your product, so we can grow together”, and constantly do our best to deliver extraordinary work and results for our clients and partners.

After some of the very successful projects that we built for our clients, we decided to put those skills to good use, push ourselves to the utmost extreme and, this time, make something for ourselves.

Is there a better way to host an internal 24-hour event, known as a hackathon? Maybe the one that lasts 48-hours, but let’s be a little bit more real. 🙂

What Exactly Is a Hackathon?

“A hackathon is a design sprint-like event; often, in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on software projects.” — Wikipedia

Some of our team members already had an opportunity to experience the hackathon during computer science study.

First, we ran a questionnaire amongst our colleagues to see if they were interested in this event. The response we got was quite impressive and surprising — 15 people out of 21 people decided to participate in a hackathon!

So we organized our first hackathon on the 10th of July, starting from 9 AM.

Codename: Hack-a-Sync

THE Idea

First, we brainstormed about a product idea that we can build in 24 hours to achieve a minimum viable product (MVP) and launch it in a short time.

Our idea was a lead generation tool that would simplify extracting, finding, and organizing leads from Google Maps and track them throughout the sales process.

Although it wasn’t a revolutionary idea, and there are already few lead generation tools on the market, it seemed there is quite some room for improvement and to make this tool even better and more user-friendly.

H-Day (10th of July)

It is Saturday morning. The clock struck 9:00, and we are ready for our first hackathon.

The hype is in the air!

First, we introduced the lead generation tool idea to the whole team, then organized the team and divided ourselves into two big groups:

• Design & Marketing
• Development & Project Management

Every two hours, we had team sync to have a steady flow of work, functionalities, and materials that the next step in development or marketing relies on.

Marketing & Design Team

The marketing team worked on marketing strategy, digital advertisement, and copywriting for our new product.

Marketing&Design started to work on brand identity. Their first task was to think about the brand name and identity. After few hours of brainstorming, research, and domain availability checks, we finally got the name! Net’em.

Now we had the base on which the team will be able to part ways where the design team starts working on the app’s brand book, landing page, and UX.

Development & Project Management

Before organizing every developer, we all must grasp all core functionalities and rough user stories inside the app.

First, we started with some basic architecture and workflows to represent how the system works on a higher technical level.

We started with a “General Flow” map to get a more comprehensive understanding of how the app should work and interact.

Halfway to Our Goal

Suddenly, it is 10 PM, meaning we are more than halfway through. Yay!
After 13 hours of work, productivity slowly began to decline.

Slowly the first signs of fatigue began to appear. The struggle is real, but then we pushed ourselves even harder.

Until now, we have done most of the work, and we are ready to start integrating APIs, HTTP crawlers, user registration, authorization, and UI.

It’s 3:21 AM. Time to see who is a night owl and who is a morning person. 😀 Everybody is highly sleepy and tired, but the code keeps running, and we are getting the first outlines of the app. Russian Hardbass is on, keeping us awake.

The crawlers are now getting first leads.

The Final Countdown

It is 8:45 AM. And it’s already Sunday. (Scarface | Push It to the Limit playing in the background)

We are quickly finishing all the work and are excited to see our final product.

Finally, it’s 9:00 AM. Our first Hackathon is behind us. Cross-functional teams from Design, Marketing, and Development department came together to solve one challenge in only 24 hours!

Tired but happy faces all around. But never too tired to hack together and wrap it up with big applause and a sip of champagne (for breakfast :)).

It was a genuinely overwhelming but inspiring experience, and after a 24 hours challenge, we have a good reason to be proud of ourselves!

Did We Succeed? Where Is the Final Product?

Yes, we did it. In just 24 hours, we managed to build the lead generation tool from scratch.

Let us introduce Net’em platform, an ideal solution for a target audience looking for quick access to leads. Why is it ideal and what, and what sets it apart from the competition?

With Net’em, you can quickly get a large number of leads in just a few minutes.

The app generates leads at the user’s request and provides lead information such as name, website, address, phone number, and email.

How does it work? The user search for leads based on the location and the query. Generated leads are shown to the user in a list, where they can mark them as Cold/Hot Lead and write a comment next to each of them.​​

The platform was created as Funnel, where the user scans the status of contacted leads and monitors Sales.

We still have to polish some things before going further with the platform, but Net’em is a solid in-house product that we will surely improve in the coming months.

What we learned from this Hack-a-Sync, and is our product ready for the market? Read in our full article about our first hackathon.