Learnings from presenting our Hackathon project as a Start-up Pitch

Narendra Vardi -

Hi! My name is Narendra Vardi, and I write about my learnings, observations and trends in the Software world. Besides software, I also talk about photography, travel stories, books and movies. If that's something that interests you, consider subscribing.

If you’ve ever participated in a hackathon, you would know that the presentation is just as important as the idea and the solution being proposed.

We finalized our idea, and the demo was ready. We also worked on the PPT and reached out to our mentor for feedback.

He glanced through our PPT and said that we should improve our PPT by a huge margin. Instead of telling each and every aspect of it, he suggested that we watch the Startup Pitch by Reeju Datta, the Co-Founder of Cashfree Payments.

Refer to the bottom of the ycombinator page if the YouTube link is broken:

Here are my few take aways after watching this video:

  1. Points: PPT should have bullet points not bullet paragraphs.
  2. Presenters Introduction: Keep the introduction of presenters simple.
  3. Impact: Talk about it objectively.
  4. Confidence: Present with confidence.

We updated our PPT according to the take aways listed above and presented our project, we secured 5th place out of 47 participating teams! 🎉

😅
This is a hackathon internal to Cashfree Payments (where I work now), hence cannot disclose much information about the Hackathon!