solanabr/startup-builder-skill/hackathon

Hackathon Submission

Track choice → scannable description → two scripts (2–3-min pitch, ≤3-min demo) → checklist. Optimize for a judge who has 90 seconds, not a reader who has 10 minutes.

Detail lives in references/. The remaining upstream links (colosseum-copilot, the Superteam ideas dataset) are in upstream-packs.md.

Context handoff

At start, read .claude/context/idea.md and .claude/context/build.md (format, written by build-status) if present — pull the pitch, wedge, and what actually works (its "What works today" section) from them instead of asking again. Read .claude/context/positioning.md (format, written by positioning) if present too — the tagline is its plain one-liner, the alternatives table feeds "the novel part", and its words-to-avoid list applies to the description.

Workflow

1. Check the format, then pick the least-crowded track

Colosseum runs its hackathons as startup competitions, and formats change: Frontier 2026 had no tracks at all. Read the current rules first. Where tracks exist, winning a thin track beats placing in a fat one. Per candidate track: estimate entry volume, fit with what's actually built, and judge appetite (sponsor tracks often have the fewest serious entries).

• Winner history: winners.md — Grand Champions and track first places from Grizzlython 2023 to Frontier 2026, dated, each row linked to its announcement post
• Live crowdedness check: colosseum-copilot — query 5,400+ past submissions for cluster density and gaps. CLI-backed: sign in once per machine with npx @colosseum-org/copilot-connect login (Node 20+).

2. Write a scannable description

Judges read 100+ submissions. Yours gets one skim deciding whether it gets a real read:

• Tagline: what it does, one sentence, no jargon
• First paragraph: problem + who has it
• Bold the one thing that's novel
• "What works today" list — demo-able claims only, never roadmap dressed as product
• Why Solana (one concrete reason: speed, fees, composability with X)

Full structure (200–500 words, paragraph-by-paragraph) and the fields Colosseum's portal asks for, including go-to-market and demand validation: submission-guide.md. Score the draft against judging-criteria.md before submitting: Colosseum's seven published factors, which carry no published weights.

3. Videos (each ≤ 3 minutes)

Colosseum asks for two: a 2–3 minute presentation video (the startup pitch, judged first) and a product demo of at most 3 minutes. Scripts for both: demo-video-script.md. The product demo, in outline:

Rule: if the demo can fail live, record it.

Before scripting the presentation video, read what-separates-winners.md: citing traction and a founder credential separated 43 accelerated winners from 47 projects from the same hackathons that won nothing; for the product on screen and an explorer transaction the study detected no difference. The script checklist is pitch-rhetoric.md.

4. Submission checklist

• [ ] Track (if the event has tracks) chosen by fit, then crowdedness, not vanity
• [ ] Tagline passes the "non-crypto friend" test
• [ ] Description scannable in 90 seconds (bold claims, short paragraphs)
• [ ] Presentation video 2–3 min (team, problem, evidence, why now)
• [ ] Demo video ≤ 3 min, real transaction shown
• [ ] Go-to-market and demand-validation fields filled with sourced evidence
• [ ] Pre-existing code disclosed; every link opens for a logged-out judge
• [ ] Repo public (or access granted to judges), README quickstart actually works from clone
• [ ] Deployed link (devnet OK) + program ID listed
• [ ] Team and contact info complete
• [ ] Pitch deck attached if track requires one — use pitch-deck

After the hackathon: grants

Losing the track doesn't mean losing the funding. Same artifacts (description, demo, deck) feed grant applications:

• Superteam Earn (earn.superteam.fun) — bounties + grants up to ~$10k USDC equivalent, fast cycles, regional Superteams
• Solana Foundation grants — milestone-based, public-good angle; reuse the scannable description with an ecosystem-benefit paragraph
• Superteam Agentic Engineering grant — 200 USDG toward an AI coding subscription, half on approval and half once a live Solana MVP ships (page; applications showed as paused on 2026-10-05)
• Grant-shaped ideas dataset: superteam-ideas.json