An unusual hackathon that competes only on "sales" is drawing attention. THE Hackathon, jointly sponsored by Unbound Lab and others, will run for eight days from March 21 to 28.
The hallmark of this hackathon is that rankings are decided solely by "actual sales," without judges or presentation scoring. Teams will be evaluated based on the payment amounts they generate during the event. The organizers said they "focused on whether teams can actually make money in the market, not on ideas or presentations."
The roster of participants also stands out. Participants include Lee Taeyang, Toss co-founder; Ryu Giback, Fountain CEO; Kim Ingi, Code States CEO; and Sung Jaeyong, Nari Labs CEO, a college student founder who hit No. 1 on Hugging Face Trending. Lawmaker Lee Jun-seok also joined the competition as a participant, not as a judge.
About 400 people applied for the event, and 80 were selected to develop at the offline hackathon. Startup hiring platform Candid handled the selection process, conducting interviews and team matching over about two weeks.
A range of corporations are also taking part. OpenAI is serving as the infrastructure partner, FLock.io and Upstage are track partners, and venture capital firms including Kakao Ventures and Mashup Ventures are joining as partners.
THE Hackathon is run as a nonprofit. The operations team is a volunteer group made up of college students and working professionals. The total prize pool is 10 million won. The event features offline development on the 21st–22nd, followed by market validation through the 27th, and concludes with an awards ceremony on the 28th. For details, visit the website (thehackathon.org).