First of all I wasnt supposed to attend this hackathon, 8 hours before day-1 my freind Seif calls me "Yo, Youseph did u get into spurhacks?" i said uhhh, next thing you know it we are driving 1 hour to Waterloo the next day to participate in this hackathon.
Our idea was to create a decentralized platform using blockchain to authenticate real-world products, However like most hackathon ideas we overlooked the difficulty of implementing it in a short amount of time.
our vision was solid, but a full mvp wasn’t realistic. so instead of forcing a rushed prototype, we made a decision that changed everything: we pivoted from the hackathon track to the startup track. the shift instead of building the mvp out, we focused on understanding the market, users, business model, and scalability of jinsa.
Even though we couldnt win anything in the hackathon, we were 1 of 30 startups invited to the accelator program where we would receive funding and support to build our product.
We competed, pitched our idea over 10 times to angel investors, and drove everyday to waterloo and back home everyday for 1 week straight, we were exhausted but we did it.
Our idea was so solid we were 1 of 10 startups to recieve funding approval (150K CAD), infastructure and, support to build our product.
Our plans for Jinsa arent still clear but the experince we gained from this whole thing was incredible we proved to ourselves that we can build anything we want, the idea just has to be solid.