Timing of the Hackathon:

• Designed to be early in 2023, kick off the year right
• Post-FTX builders down in the dumps, but builders are still there and should create an event they rally around.

Specifically a ground-up initative led by Mert.

Getting Sponsors:

• What does a sponsor care about? → They want their money to be effectively used, people to hear about them, and for integrations to be built or KPis to be achieved.
  • ALL sponsor funds directly went to people building specific things (specified by the sponsor), and utiziling their products.
  • Helius → must use Helius API
  • Openbook → Must use openbook integration
  • This way, sponsors know that they’re money went to the right teams instead of random “DeFi” or “Infrastructure” teams, and were more willing to sponsor
• Look for Misc/Independent sponsors such as Solana Foundation, Bonk, or Multicoin to sponsor Grand Prizes or additional bonuses such as $BONK for open sourcing. These kept the event fun and was the main overall draw (grand prizes).
• Additionally, exploring synergies such as Flipside + Helius or Poolprops + Betdex proved to be helpful.
• Sponsors should also be willing to help with co-marketing, such as tweets or shilling.
• Physical locations help attract new builders to meet sponsors → Talk to Clockwork to see how it went.
  • Likely subpar, most people built from home or with their own teams. Host dinners or relaxed sessions instead

Building a Website / Designers:

• Irfan is goated
• We used a json deployment to a pre-designed template by Irfan. tbh not sure what was going on here most of the time.
• Notion can also function as a simple website, display all the information nicely and then connect to the domain.

Setting up tracks:

• Throw in a Grand Prize to attract participants overall
  • DeFi Grand Prize, LamportDAO Grand Prize and Superteam Grand Prize