This weekend, we held our company’s second hackathon! At our first hackathon last year, Adam created an awesome Apple Watch app that serves as a proof of concept for a wearable integration with MySwimPro. For this hackathon, we decided that the theme focus on social interaction.
Design Challenge Questions
Fares: How might we use digital media to grow our social following, engagement and brand power!
Adam (iOS) & Mike (Android): Part 1: How might we make it easier for athletes to share their progress from MySwimPro to social media? Part 2: how might we make it easier for friends of swimmers on social media to download MySwimPro?
Results
I kicked things off by presenting the two videos I created. I posted the short video below on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at 4pm. By the time of the presentation which was a little bit after 8pm, the video had received over 20 Retweets on twitter, 600 likes on Instagram, and nearly 500 views on Facebook!
This is why we swim! pic.twitter.com/5hRlVvWxYR
— MySwimPro (@MySwimPro) January 31, 2016
The second video takes a more commercial storyboard to our app’s features. The ability to create content and have others re-share in real-time shows the power of social media and the value in growing our brand.
Adam and Mike created a simple way to share a completed swim workout to social media directly within MySwimPro. Before this feature was designed and implemented an athlete needed to manually stitch screenshots together and leave the app entirely to post to any of their favorite social networks.
They were able to prototype a design, get a build up and running, and even receive feedback on the design from swimmers across the country within a matter of hours. I was even able to tweet the workout Adam and I swam that day using the build that was created during the hackathon:
Just swam 2,250 with @adoxner in the midst of our first #hackathon of 2016! #MySwimPro #SwimSmarter pic.twitter.com/5TZmekBJFq
— Fares Ksebati (@FaresKsebati) January 31, 2016
For part two of the design challenge statement, Adam and Mike worked on creating a web-view so any athlete’s workout could be shared with a unique URL so that others can view it and download MySwimPro!
Evaluation
Similar to our first hackathon, we were judged by four equally weighted criteria.
VALUE (25%): Value-add based on customer discovery
- How correlated is the solution to the pain identified in customer discovery
- Must show validation by target demographic
DESIGN (25%): Design and Technical Execution
- Technical difficulty to build
- Overall design aesthetic
BUSINESS CASE (25%): Relevance to Business
- Significance to existing business model
- Speed to implement to business/product roadmap
IMPRESSIVENESS (25%): WOW factor
- Level of awesomeness
We summoned the help of our Summer Associate, Will Raynor to serve as our official judge and facilitate presentation feedback. Below are some of the notes Will shared with us after our presentations:
“The videos Fares worked on add value to the business plan and use viral marketing to connect with athletes over social media. The videos are edited together very well. The video would benefit from adding swimmer testimonials about why they love using MySwimPro. This would help influence viewers to download and try the app.”
“Adam worked on a solution to entice swimmers to easily share their workouts. There was a lot of customer discovery that shows this solution to be valuable. This feature will galvanize their own followers to using MySwimPro. This is great built in marketing for the app. The web view needs some more time to develop, but looks promising”
“Michael made a feature similar to Adam’s but for the Android version of the app. It contributes to the business case through viral marketing in the same way as Adam’s iOS solution. I like Mike’s because of the pop up window within the app suggests the athlete to share. This shows multiple ways they can share over social media after every workout, and this encourages more social interaction, which will lead to more sharing!”
Interested in learning more? Feel free to shoot me an email at fares@myswimpro.com!