The Call That Started Everything
We got the invitation to Plus Hackathon at BITS Pilani with about 10 days notice. International level. 200+ teams. A campus that makes your own college look like a tuition center.
We said yes immediately. Then panicked for 10 days.
The Team and the Problem We Chose
Four of us. Two developers, one designer, one person who was supposed to do "business stuff" but ended up debugging CSS at 2 AM. Classic hackathon team composition.
The problem we chose was in EdTech — specifically the gap between what students need to study and what is actually available to them in an organized, accessible format. (Sound familiar? This is literally what Ycotes is built on.)
Our solution was an AI-powered study assistant that could take a syllabus PDF and generate structured notes, practice questions, and a study plan — in under 60 seconds.
Day 1: Arrival and the Campus Reality Check
BITS Pilani is beautiful in a way that makes you feel underprepared. The kind of place where students have research papers published before their third year. Walking in with a laptop bag and a half-formed idea feels appropriately humbling.
We spent the first evening scoping the competition. The teams we were most worried about had designers who made our UI look like a school project, and developers who were clearly building things we did not fully understand. Healthy fear is good fuel.
The All-Nighter That Almost Broke Us
Around 3 AM on the hackathon night, our AI pipeline broke. The LLM was returning inconsistent formats — sometimes Markdown, sometimes JSON, sometimes just a rambling essay. Our frontend expected structured data and was rendering garbage.
We had two choices: fix the parsing on the backend, or prompt-engineer the LLM to return consistent output. We chose both simultaneously — one person on parsing, one on prompt engineering — while the other two slept in 90-minute shifts.
By 6 AM it worked. It was not elegant. But it worked.
The best hackathon code is not the cleanest code. It is code that runs in front of judges without errors.
The Presentation: What We Did Right
Most teams demo features. We told a story. We opened with a 30-second scenario: a student sitting up at midnight before an exam, panicking, with a 400-page textbook and no idea where to start. Then we showed our product solving that exact problem — live, in real time, in front of the judges.
No slides. No bullet points. Just a working product solving a real problem for a real person. Judges who have seen 50 presentations in a day remember the ones that felt human.
The Result and What Runner-Up Actually Feels Like
We came second. Which means we won the losing round of the final. There is a specific flavour of emotion in that — proud and gutted simultaneously. The team that won had a marginally more polished UI and a stronger technical moat (they had trained a custom model). Fair win.
But we walked away with something more valuable than first place: a proof of concept that actually worked, a team that had built under pressure, and a much clearer picture of what Ycotes could become.
5 Lessons for Your First Hackathon
- Narrow the problem to something demonstrably solvable in 24 hours. Teams that try to build platforms lose to teams that solve one specific, painful problem brilliantly.
- The demo is the product during a hackathon. Build the happy path first. Edge cases come after you win.
- Sleep in shifts. A rested developer at 6 AM is worth three exhausted ones. This is not optional advice.
- Tell a story, not a feature list. Judges are human. They remember emotion, not specifications.
- Apply to every hackathon you can. The skills compound faster than you think. Our second BITS Pilani hackathon went dramatically smoother than our first.
What Happened After
The product we built at that hackathon became the core of Ycotes Buddy — the AI assistant now used by students across 10+ universities. Sometimes the best features come from a panic build at 3 AM in a college dormitory in Rajasthan.
If you are a student thinking about entering your first hackathon: do it. The worst case is that you build something, learn something, and sleep badly for 36 hours. The best case changes your trajectory.
Find upcoming hackathons on Ycotes Events — we track every major competition and post eligibility, prizes, and deadlines so you never miss your shot.