App Builder Hackathon
A weekend to put the thing your startup does into people’s hands as an app. Ship something installable by Sunday morning.
Why give it a weekend
No prizes for this one
This jam does not award prize money or credits. Everything below is what you take away from it, and it is the reason most people come.
An expert on your actual problem
An hour of questions about your product and your list, not the topic in general.
Everyone else’s workflow, not just your own
Everyone publishes how they did it. You write one and you read the rest.
A finished thing, not a plan
A hard deadline and a room of people working the same 48 hours.
A permanent entry in the archive
Your submission stays up under your name. Hide it whenever you want.
How the 48 hours run
- Done
Joining opens
Anyone can claim a place. Joining closes 24 hours before the deadline so there is time left to ship.
- Next up
Kickoff
The jam opens, the brief goes live and the resource pack unlocks.
Joining closes
The last moment to claim a place. After this the jam runs to the end with whoever is in.
Deliverables due
Submit what you shipped and the workflow behind it. Both are public by default, and you can hide yours at any time.
The expert
To be announced before the jam opens. The session runs live during the jam and takes questions about your product and your list, not the topic in general.
What you submit
**You have 48 hours to put the thing your startup does into people's hands as an app.**
If everything you offer lives behind a browser tab, this weekend is for building the first installable surface — a mobile app, a desktop app, a PWA that earns its place on a home screen. If you already have one, the work is making it something people actually open.
The instinct is to rebuild the whole product in miniature. Resist it. One job your users need on the go, done properly as an app, beats a shrunken copy of your website — and unlike a copy, you can watch it get used.
Possible directions: A companion app for the one thing users check daily. Push notifications that earn their interruption. An offline-first surface. A PWA install flow. A native wrapper done honestly. An internal app for your own operations. Something else entirely.
This is a build weekend. By Sunday there should be something installable that was not installable on Friday.
Plus the workflow: where you started, what you did in order, what did not work, what you would change.