After the hackathon: turning a prototype into a product people use

Trophy and certificate of merit at Vividhotsava 2025
Trophy and certificate of merit at Vividhotsava 2025

Originally published at https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/blog/after-the-hackathon-turn-prototype-into-product. That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first.

Annapurna won BYTEBATTLE as a weekend prototype and became a real food-sharing platform because we treated the Monday after as the actual start. STROT did not win its hackathon and we kept shipping it anyway. The two weeks after an event are where a hackathon project either becomes a portfolio piece or a folder you never open again.

Day one: decide honestly

Ask three questions. Did anyone other than the team want this? Is the hard part solved or faked? Would you use it? If two answers are no, archive the repo with a good README and move on without guilt — a finished, documented prototype is still a fine portfolio item.

Walking a room through evaluation criteria
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Week one: rewrite the skeleton, keep the insight

  • Keep the problem statement, the user research and the demo path.
  • Rewrite the parts written at 4 a.m. — usually auth, data models and error handling.
  • Replace mocked services with real ones, one at a time, with tests on the demo path.
  • Set up deployment properly: environment variables, a database with backups, structured logs.

Week two: ten real users

Not a launch — ten people who have the problem, using it while you watch. For Annapurna that meant NGOs and volunteers, not classmates. Write down every confusion. Fix the top three. That loop, repeated, is the entire difference between a prototype and a product.

What to keep from the hackathon

The pitch. It is the clearest statement of the problem you will ever write, and it becomes your README, your LinkedIn post and your interview answer. Judges' feedback too — the criticisms you disagreed with at the time are usually the ones worth revisiting.

Presenting BrandHive
Presenting BrandHive

Tell the story

Post the journey publicly: what you built, what broke, what users said. Building in public after the event is how the project keeps paying off long after the prize money is spent — and it is how mentors and judges remember your name at the next event.

From my carousels
Three First Prizes, One Loss
Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 1Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 2
Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 3Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 4
Full carousel on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour
GenAI engineer, Kanpur · 3x first-prize hackathon winner · campus mentor
I ship production RAG pipelines, fine-tune LLMs and build agentic AI products end to end. I lead engineering at SCULT INDIA for a 14-member team and have mentored 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave.
Open to: GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges.
On stage, at hackathons and on campus
Presenting KrishGyan, farming advice in your voice and language
Presenting KrishGyan, farming advice in your voice and language
Speaking at a MeetKats event
Speaking at a MeetKats event
At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon
At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Forming a hackathon team: roles, skills and the mistake most teams make

Image
At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon Originally published at https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/blog/hackathon-team-roles-and-formation . That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first. Team TechVerse — Raman Shukla, Saksham Gupta and me — won three first prizes in 2025 not because we were the strongest coders in the room, but because we had stopped overlapping. When I mentor teams before a hackathon, formation is the first thing I fix. In a packed college auditorium The four roles Builder — owns the core feature and the demo path. Usually backend or the AI piece. Interface — owns what the judge sees: the front end, the flow, the seeded data. Storyteller — owns the problem statement, the pitch, the slides and the Q&A plan; also does user research in hour one. Integrator — keeps the pieces working together, manages the repo, runs the demo rehearsals. In a team of three, the builder or interface person takes this. The mistake Five friends who all write R...
Read more

Hello from Kanpur: what I build, and what I'll write about here

Image
On the mic Originally published at https://dev.to/pranjulrathour/hello-from-kanpur-what-i-build-and-what-ill-write-about-here-f2j . That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first. I'm Pranjul Rathour, a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India. This is the first post on this blog, so here is who is writing, what I have actually shipped, and what you can expect if you follow along. What I build Between February and July 2026, at Next Upgrad Web Solutions, I designed, built and shipped five production AI applications end to end, alone, and deployed all of them with Docker, CI and observability: RAG.NextUpgrad : a retrieval-augmented generation service with hybrid dense plus BM25 retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, streaming cited answers, and a confidence gate that refuses to call the model when the evidence is weak. It runs in about 220 MB of memory, inside a free 512 MB instance. FineTune Studio : fine-tune open models with QLoRA in a browser. Upload a dataset, validate ...
Read more

I built 15 free tools, 1,211 prompts and a 50,000-skill library — here's what's inside tools.scult.in

Image
Carousel · 12 slides I built every part of tools.scult.in myself — 15 browser tools, 1,211 version-stamped prompts, a 50,000+ agent-skills library, a public MCP server, and 40 retro photo prompts where I'm the face in every example. All of it free. No signup, no ads, no upload step. Swipe through for what's inside and why I built it this way. Link in the last slide. Slide 1 of 12 Slide 2 of 12 Slide 3 of 12 Slide 4 of 12 Slide 5 of 12 Slide 6 of 12 Slide 7 of 12 Slide 8 of 12 Slide 9 of 12 Slide 10 of 12 Slide 11 of 12 Slide 12 of 12 Pranjul Rathour GenAI engineer, Kanpur · 3x first-prize hackathon winner · campus mentor I ship production RAG pipelines, fine-tune LLMs and build agentic AI products end to end. I lead engineering at SCULT INDIA for a 14-member team and have mentored 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave. Open to: GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com Portfolio & ...
Read more