The app for running a hackathon
A hackathon is forty-eight hours in which nobody looks at a printed schedule and everybody misses a deadline. The app's job is to put the next deadline on a phone that is already in someone's hand.
A planning figure: the size where mentor time becomes the scarce resource and the schedule stops fitting on a whiteboard.
What survives hour thirty-one
A hackathon app carries the timeline, the mentor sessions, the deadline alerts and the participant directory for a build event. event67 handles all of that under the event's own brand, with server-enforced capacity on mentor office hours and push notifications that deep-link to the exact announcement. It does not do project submission, team formation or judging scores, so a hackathon platform sits alongside it for those.
Deadlines that arrive where people are looking
Submission at 10:00, demos at 14:00, judging at 16:00. Push notifications deep-link to the announcement, which is the only channel that reaches someone wearing headphones at hour thirty-one. Announcements can be scheduled in advance, so the two-hour warning fires whether or not an organizer remembers.
Mentor office hours that do not oversell
Mentor time is the scarcest thing at a hackathon. Book it as sessions with real capacity, enforced on the server, with automatic waitlist promotion when a slot frees. That replaces the sign-up sheet on a wall that three teams have crossed each other out on.
A directory for teams that have not formed yet
The attendee directory is searchable by name and company, with profiles carrying interests and links. It is how a solo participant finds a front-end developer at hour two. QR connections keep the contact afterwards, which is often the participant's real takeaway.
A record of what got built
The shared photo album collects the whiteboards, the demos and the 03:00 pizza, moderated at whatever level you want. Sponsor pages give the companies funding the prizes tier-ordered visibility with logos and links.
Forty-eight hours on the clock
Sign-up closes
Import participants
Registration happens in whatever tool you already use, because event67 does not sell tickets or take payments. Export, import as CSV, send branded invites with delivery tracked per recipient.
Uses the branded app and branded invites with delivery tracking.
Hour zero
Check-in and the opening brief
QR check-in at the door with a live arrivals count, which for a hackathon is really a catering and swag count. The opening announcement goes out as a push with the rules attached.
Uses check-in and push announcements.
Hours one to forty
Mentors, workshops and the clock
Mentor slots and technical workshops sit in the schedule with capacity limits. Scheduled announcements fire at the checkpoints you set at planning time rather than the ones an exhausted organizer remembers.
Uses the schedule.
Demos
The room votes, the judges decide
Live polls give a people's-choice reading in under a minute. Judging scores themselves are not something event67 handles, so run those on paper or in your hackathon platform and use the poll for the audience award.
Uses live polls.
After
Photos, feedback, and next year's list
The album is the artefact sponsors want. Session feedback tells you which workshops were worth a mentor's Saturday. The engagement analytics tell you how many of the people who signed up actually turned up, which for a hackathon is always the interesting number.
Uses the shared album and analytics.
Setting a hackathon up
Five steps. The scheduled announcements in step four are the ones that save you at hour thirty.
Create the event across the full clock
Set the event to span the whole build window, not just the sessions, so the timeline reads correctly overnight.
Build the timeline as sessions
Opening, workshops, mentor blocks, submission, demos, judging. Each with a room and a facilitator.
Set mentor capacity honestly
Server-enforced RSVP limits with waitlist promotion. A mentor who can take four teams should be entered as four.
Schedule every deadline announcement in advance
Twelve hours, two hours, thirty minutes. Write them at planning time; nobody writes good copy at 04:00.
Set the photo posture to open
A hackathon album is better open than curated. A reported photo auto-hides, which is the safeguard that makes that safe.
What a 320-hacker event costs
Three hundred and twenty participants activate. Fifty are free and the rest are billable once for the whole weekend. Sign-ups who never turn up, which at a free hackathon is a famously large share, cost nothing.
- activated attendees
- 320activated attendees
- billable, after the first 50 are free
- 270billable, after the first 50 are free
- for the whole event, at $5.00 each
- $1,350for the whole event, at $5.00 each
Activation means the participant claimed the invite and opened the app. No-shows are never billed.
The hackathon-specific things we do not do
A hackathon platform and an event app are different products. event67 is the second one.
- No project submission, repository links or demo uploads.
- No team formation tooling and no team rosters.
- No judging: no scoring rubrics, no judge assignment, no leaderboards.
- No gamification of any kind. Points, badges and leaderboards are absent by design.
- No ticketing or registration payments.
Last updated
What it costs
- Free up to 50
- activated attendees, on one live event
- $5
- per activated attendee beyond 50
- $4,750
- the most one event can ever cost, whatever happens past 1,000
Activated means the person claimed their invite and opened the app. Not when you import them, not when the invite is delivered, and not if they register and stay home.
Questions people actually ask
Can teams submit their projects through the app?
No. There is no project submission, no repository linking and no demo upload. Use a hackathon platform for submissions and judging, and event67 for the schedule, the mentors, the alerts and the directory.
Is there a leaderboard?
No, and not by accident. There is no gamification in event67: no points, no badges and no leaderboards. Live polls can produce an audience award; nothing keeps a running score.
How do mentor sign-ups avoid double-booking?
Capacity is checked on the server rather than in the app, so two participants tapping at the same moment cannot both take the last slot. When someone drops, the next on the waitlist is promoted automatically.
Do participants need to install anything at 2am?
The web version carries the same schedule and announcements, so no. Push notifications only work in the installed app, which is the argument for getting people to install at check-in rather than at hour thirty.
Can sponsors run their own challenge tracks?
They can appear as tier-ordered sponsor pages and be attached to sessions, and a challenge can be a track in the schedule. There is no sponsor self-serve portal, so an organizer loads that content on their behalf.
Keep reading
Other kinds of event
The features this leans on
Put the deadline on every phone in the room
Scheduled push alerts, mentor slots with real capacity, and a directory that helps teams form. Free to fifty.