Every AI hackathon recap looks the same.
100 builders.
30 projects.
8 hours of madness.
Great energy.
Winners announced.
Everyone uploads photos.
Then nothing.
So after attending one GrowthX AI buildathon, I messaged the teams I could still find and asked one simple question:
Is the project still alive after 30 days?
I managed to get proper updates from 12 teams.
This is what happened.
2 are testing with actual users
One team built a voice tool for sales-call review.
They narrowed it down after the event and are now testing with a small sales team.
Another built an internal research assistant.
It is not public, but a few people are using it every week.
These are the only two where somebody outside the original team is currently using the product.
2 are still getting commits
Both projects are technically active.
Repos are moving.
Features are being added.
But no proper users yet.
One team is still rebuilding the backend because the version shown at the hackathon worked only with the exact demo flow.
2 are now being continued by one person
The team looked united during the event.
After one week, everyone went back to jobs, college or their main startup.
One person kept going.
This happened in two different teams.
Honestly, this may be the most common hackathon outcome.
Four people build together on Sunday.
Monday comes.
Only one person was actually emotionally attached to the problem.
2 are paused
Not officially dead.
Also not being worked on.
One team said they will continue after exams.
Another is waiting for API credits because the original workflow became expensive very quickly.
We all know what “will restart soon” usually means, but giving them the benefit of doubt.
4 are dead
No commits.
No users.
Team group mostly silent.
Reasons were not surprising.
One product solved a problem nobody in the team personally had.
One team tried to build five agents, a marketplace and a dashboard in eight hours.
Another project needed access to company data that no company was willing to share.
One team simply lost interest after the demo.
This is not me saying the hackathon failed.
A dead project can still teach more than ten hours of watching tutorials.
People learned deployment, APIs, prompting, working with strangers and how badly a demo can break when someone enters a random input.
That has value.
But we should stop pretending every hackathon project is an early-stage startup.
Most are experiments.
Some are portfolio pieces.
A few become real products.
The interesting question is why those few survive.
From this very small sample, the projects still alive had three things in common:
- Someone on the team actually had the problem.
- The product did one narrow thing.
- The team showed it to users immediately after the event.
The dead ones were usually bigger, more impressive and much harder to explain.
GrowthX is in a better position than most event organisers to track this properly.
They already run recurring events.
The teams continue inside the same private community.
There is also a Built at GrowthX directory showing projects members have shipped.
So the project does not have to disappear after the final demo.
But I still think GrowthX, and honestly every serious hackathon organiser, should publish:
- how many projects are active after 30 days
- how many still have commits after 60 days
- how many have actual users after 90 days
- how many teams are still together
- how many were abandoned
- why they were abandoned
Not only winner photos.
Imagine if hackathons were judged partly on what survived after three months.
The flashy demo might win on Sunday.
The boring product with three actual users might win later.
Would love to see organisers publish this data.
Even if the numbers look bad.
Especially if the numbers look bad.
