Maybe you just started a new DevRel role and want to make a hackathon plan to impress your founder.

Maybe you are in charge of marketing and you are trying to win developer's hearts and you heard devs love hackathons.

Maybe you are in a telegram group of DevRels and it's gone too quiet so you ask the age-old question:

HOW DO YOU MEASURE HACKATHON ROI? (Return on Investment for the non biz folks)

As a hackathon anthropologist, dev, and spreader of developer joy, I am here to answer that for you. And of course, this is only just one Dan's opinion, but I come with a swag bag full of experience to my name.

This is a 3 part series, which will become clear why later, since we can't agree if people read articles anymore.

Warning

I love to hear everyone's thoughts on this topic to grow as an industry but if you are the "itz just vibez and bounties big dawg!" type, save yourself from typing.

typing.

The Answer You've Been Looking For

The classic answer to this question is that "it depends". And what it depends on is where you are as a team.

Teams come into 3 distinct but equally delicious flavors:

Bounty Babes: These are teams just starting to explore the world of sponsoring hackathons. Maybe you have sponsored a few bounties here and there and still wondering what the point of all this is.

Weak Wi-fi Warriors: These are teams who have sponsored 5 or more hackathons. You probably have a meeting every quarter asking yourself "Should we even sponsor hackathons anymore?" or brainstorming sessions on "new" and "innovative" ways to host a hackathon.

Hackathon Heroes: These are teams that sponsor 5 or more hackathons each year. You are so far down the hackathon rabbit hole that you purposely ruin your wifi speeds and skip a few weekly showers just to feel something.

I want to get beyond the vanity metrics of "how many projects submitted". If this is all you measure, 80% of teams will go home disappointed.

You don't want that, I don't want that. Nobody wants that!

Let's start by talking to you - Bounty Babes

Goal: Awareness

Your priority goal is to decrease the amount devs that have never heard of you. This doesn't mean splurging on the best swag (although great swag is a blessing) or having someone hand out flyers to every dev they see.

Quite the opposite.

First, you should focus on your team's awareness of where your project lives in the dev mindshare. Once you have a better understanding of that, dev awareness can be grown more organically. But how can you measure that?

Outcome: Clarity

You might have an idea of the usefulness of your project. Forget that for a sec. You need a better understanding of how devs view your project. One way to measure this is simply tracking the amount of conversations your team is having with devs.

These conversations don't have to be deep but you should come out of it with one key data point: what they are planning to build and how.

Why? Let's take the example that you are a decentralized AI network that sponsors a hackathon. They had 20 chats with devs that talked about building an AI product.

Yet on the final day, you get 1 submission. What happened?

Well, they chose an alternative. So we failed? No (well not yet at least).

Strategy: Investigate

So you finally recovered from the weeks long jet lag you earned by going to ETH Phuket and you are still feeling down about your 1 submission.

You now have a choice:

1. Take to Twitter and rant about how the dev/crypto community sucks

2. Take to GitHub and investigate ways you can improve your awareness.

3. Quit and start a B2B SaaS before AI takes all of our jobs.

I'm not your mom so I can't tell you what to do but I will speak about option 2.

What did they use? How did they use it? Can your project be used in the same way? How do those projects communicate with devs? Do they have better docs and resources? Do they integrate better with other tools/protocols better?

Investigating missed opportunities will give you a better understanding of where you can improve on your project. This could be a combination of improving the project features, developer experience, marketing messaging and, learning resources.

These insights are valuable outside of the hackathon and a return on you spending a weekend in Phuket locked in a room with some devs.

See you in the next one - Weak Wifi Warriors.

With Joy,

DappaDan ❤️