Hackathon 8-10: Wow, that’s megacool!
Since 9 out of 10 startups fail, let's do 10! This is the sixth post in the Megacool Series covering the last three hackathons where our relentless pursuit of our next big startup idea flourished.
"Shit, Waitlist-as-a-Service (nicknamed: Qu, short for Queue) is really exciting! Everyone we speak with gets really engaged. I feel like this is the best idea so far." – Journal entry
They say that when you know, you know. And we could really feel it. We were onto something. We just didn't know precisely what—yet. But we knew this was the signal we'd been relentlessly working towards.
In this post, I'll share the stories from our last three hackathons from the summer of 2015.
This is the sixth part of my Megacool startup journey. Here’s an overview:
Part 1: How the Megacool journey began
Part 3: Embracing Failure – How we tested 10 different startup ideas over 10 weeks
Part 4: Hackathon 1-3: From AI travel agent to photo management adventures
Part 5: Hackathon 4-7: The messy middle
👉Part 6: Hackathon 8-10: Wow, that’s megacool!👈 YOU ARE HERE
Part 8: How we built our co-founder team
Part 9: From idea to live product
Part 10: Our bootstrapping hustle
Part 11: How we raised $1.6m in funding
Part 12: How we got acquired
Part 13: From Alpha to Acquired: The product, growth, and business model journey
Part 14: The emotional founder roller coaster
Part 15: The epilogue: Reflections on the whole journey
Hackathon 8: Qu: Waitlist-as-a-Service
In the world of entrepreneurship, great ideas often sprout from moments of adversity.
Qu emerged from the ashes of our past challenges. As the summer went on, my co-founder Nicolaj and I searched for hackathons to attend that would hopefully work as a forcing function when our backlog of potential billion-dollar ideas dried up. Towards the end of July, we attended AngelHack hosted near Palo Alto at Hewlett Packard's office.
Our breakthrough began with a reflection back to a critical moment during the viral surge of Fun Run, a real-time multiplayer mobile game Nicolaj had co-founded and I later joined. With 100k users simultaneously clamoring for access, our makeshift server setup resembled a duct-taped spaceship, ill-prepared for prime time. Many users churned away, forever lost to the abyss of a bad user experience. The hindsight was clear; what if we'd had a way to keep them warm and alert them once the servers were back on?
After extensive brainstorming sessions and some inspiration from the likes of Mailbox and Robinhood's successful waitlist launches, we envisioned the ultimate "Waitlist-as-a-Service'' product. We coined the concept "Qu'' – short for Queue. Our mission was simple yet profound: empower any developers to seamlessly integrate a waitlist into their apps with an out-of-the-box solution.
A waitlist ensured controlled, scalable access while building excitement around product launches. We couldn't recall the source, but the quote, "People who have to wait for access to the app feel a greater sense of value for the app than those that don't," guided us.
Qu rose from necessity, offering an API for web and app integration, user queue tracking, and developer control. Our business model plans spanned both scalability-seeking developers and those craving pre-launch excitement with volume-based pricing.
lowed the brainstorming in our ambitious fashion, intending to build a working waitlist version to use when we launch something in the future. Once our realistic self had fought and conquered our ambitious self, our goal became to create an interactive prototype showing friend invites in a waitlist product. Robinhood and Mailbox had built their waitlist in-house, but most developers don’t have the time to build it in favor of completing their own by launch. Qu would solve this problem for them.
Since we were moving fast, we never wrote a hypothesis or make it/break it criteria. Instead, we went heads down, not talking to anyone else but focusing on achieving our goal.
As the hackathon ended, another attendee, a founder visiting from Israel, came running over to us almost out of breath:
"This is disruptive. I see the problem you're solving, and it's huge. There's a lot of money in it." He insisted that we continue working on it.
While the hackathon concluded, our dreams expanded. We could see Qu evolve into a marketplace for pre-launch marketing, a potential rival to Product Hunt, the largest marketplace for product launches. Users could see what their friends were waiting for and their rank in various lists, creating a support network.
Back on earth, we met with the founder of an AI app.
"Just had the most valuable hour since arriving in SF. We met a founder who got so excited about Qu that she would pay at least $1000 and higher the more buzz we'd generate for them. Additionally, she said: "I'd like to invest in you once you have a finished product. I'm so incredibly excited about this product idea!"" – From our internal meeting note
Additionally, I wrote in my journal the following day:
"That Israeli founder from AngelHack is so excited about Qu that he's pitched us to some Chinese firm he knows. Very exciting!"
Though we hadn't developed explicit make it/break it criteria, the AI app and the Israeli founder's conviction were the indications we'd been needed to meet our “make it” criteria from the prior hackathons: someone wants to pay and/or invest in us based on this product idea.
In our hackathon strategy check-in that week, we discussed all our hackathons to date. Two ideas had emerged with the most substantial potential for billion-dollar potential: PRM and Qu. Given our previous efforts with PRM, we decided to double down on Qu and dedicate Hackathon 9 to explore it further.
Hackathon 9: Onboard
Following Hackathon 8, we let the ideas simmer in our minds as we had a few weeks’ break from our hackathons to visit our life partners and host a boot camp for talented developers from Norway's MIT (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
We could really feel like we were on to something, but we didn't know exactly what yet. We feared that Qu didn’t have a billion-dollar potential by itself.
Thus, once we reentered the hackathon arena, we chose to evolve from the pre-launch marketing quandary Qu aimed to address. Instead, we focused on app developers' more substantial predicament: how to acquire new users cost-effectively. With this broader shift in direction, we rebranded our hackathon project from Qu to "Onboard."
This shift felt right. We were uniquely positioned to address this problem, given we had grappled with it ourselves through our Fun Run days.
"We met with [the AI app founder]. She was so ready for Waitlist that we got all warm and fuzzy inside. She had lots of good feedback and encouraged us to apply for YC in the winter." – Journal entry
We had identified a few areas that Onboard would address to solve app developers' problems with user growth:
Pre-marketing tool (the origins for Waitlist)
Referral codes
Virality to get organic users through sharing
Our main hypothesis was that: We know that organic users acquired through friends are better users as they are more loyal than random ad acquisitions.
At the start of the week, our thought was to build a working prototype that we could use to help launch our own products. We would launch a test with Hackathon 2's Backlog app to understand the process and improve from there.
We took our evolved plans and met up with the Israeli founder who had approached us after our pitch and was out of this world excited about Qu. After listening to us, he encouraged us to become the "insurance policy" for app launches. He said a lot of things and had high hopes for us. We honestly didn't understand all of it, but we caught the most important thing: spend time on this!
And that happened: We decided we had enough signal to give this idea more time. Once we had completed all ten hackathons, we would extend Onboard with two more weeks to learn by interviewing as many app developers as possible to deepen our understanding of app developers’ problems.
“What a week! We've decided to give ourselves 2 more weeks to research Onboard. Meeting the Israeli founder again was mind blowing. We're going to become experts on waitlists! It will become an "insurance" for products in case they go viral. He also said that he had such strong conviction that we would make it after observing us through the hackathon. We were so thorough and methodical." – Journal entry
Hackathon 10: Golfsome
But before the two weeks started, we had sold our souls to a random MasterCard Hackathon as our tenth and final hackathon for the summer. As our minds were onboard Onboard, we joined another person's hackathon idea: Golfsome.
The concept was to build a sensor system to determine how mathematically great a golf swing is. The guy with the idea wanted to find a way to "settle the score" between golfers in high net-worth positions and donate their bets to charity. Honestly, it was like he wanted to take a dick-measuring contest to the next level…
Safe to say, this hackathon didn't really get anywhere and was a waste of time to attend, given how distracted we were thinking of the potential journey ahead with Onboard.
Despite my excitement for Onboard, as I signed off for the weekend, I wrote in my journal:
"I've mixed feelings about working with Onboard tomorrow. It's a BIG DEAL to go all in on it for two more weeks. We're going completely exploratory, and it's scary. I'm trying to remember that I felt the same things when we decided to continue testing PRM, and it turned out well."
We were off to the races with Onboard. But how would we validate that we should truly commit to solving this problem? And could we find a solution to the problem that we could go all in on?
Continue reading the next part here: How we validated the Megacool SDK
Many thanks to , and for taking the time to read and gift feedback this week ❤️