Hackathon 101: A Beginner's Guide to Winning Hackathons with AI

Always wanted to enter a hackathon but felt you weren’t “good enough”? This book is for you.

Hackathon 101 is a step-by-step guide for complete beginners. It takes you from not knowing where to start to building and submitting a real project, using AI tools that do the heavy coding for you.

I’m not a developer. I can’t write a program from scratch. And yet I’ve taken part in over 20 hackathons and won 4 of them which has made me over $20,000

This book is everything I learned along the way.

What you’ll learn:

• How hackathons work, and how to find the right one for you
• How to read the rules and judging criteria the way judges do
• How to pick a problem worth solving and cut it down to something you can finish
• How to build with AI coding assistants (Codex and Claude Code), with step-by-step setup guides
• How to design something that doesn’t look like generic AI work
• How to put your project online, even if you’ve never done it before
• How to write a submission and record a demo video that judges remember
• What to do after the hackathon, win or lose

What you get:

• The full ebook (PDF, 170 pages), written in plain language for non-technical readers
• Buying in November? You also get to join our 30 Days Build with AI Challenge
• A free Hackathon Tracker template for Notion or Google Sheets
• 19 detailed AI prompts you can copy and use straight away
• Checklists, a glossary, and a resource list of tools and platforms
• Access to the HackList community on Telegram for daily hackathon updates

Who it’s for: Anyone who is curious about building with AI. You don’t need to know how to code.