How to organize a hackathon from scratch: an 8-week plan

Most advice on organizing a hackathon ends with "gather a team and come up with a topic." In practice, success or failure is decided by boring details: how many weeks in advance registration opened, who is responsible for food on Saturday night, and what a participant sees when they want to submit their project. Below is a step-by-step plan we've gathered from dozens of events, and throughout the text, we'll show how the Stavleak platform, where the event lives from the first setup to the final results, takes care of all the routine.

8 weeks out: concept and budget

First, answer one question: why do you need this hackathon? Hiring juniors, promoting a product among developers, student activity at a university, testing a new API. Everything else depends on the goal, including task topics and the jury composition. A vague "we want some action" leads to the team arguing about t-shirt colors instead of the program a month later.

Right then, estimate the format and budget. Online is cheaper and gathers more registrations, but less than half reach the finals. Offline is more expensive due to the venue and food, but engagement is higher. And immediately cross out "event website development" from your budget: the page, registration, evaluation, and results are covered by a ready-made platform, which we'll return to below.

6 weeks out: venue, prizes, and registration

If the hackathon is offline, the venue is booked first. Good lofts and coworkings in Almaty and Astana are booked a month or a month and a half in advance, especially for weekends. Check three things people often forget: stable Wi-Fi for over a hundred devices, power outlets at every table, and the ability to stay overnight.

Open registration this exact week. The earlier a person registers, the higher the chance they will show up. On Stavleak, you can build an event page, an application form with the exact fields you need, and split the hackathon into tracks and rounds in a single evening, without developers or a separate website. Applications go straight to your organizer panel, and you decide whom to approve. There, teamless participants can also find each other on the team search board, so part of the work is done even before the start.

Don't just chase the prize pool amount. A meaningful prize (an internship, mentorship, a year's access to a paid service, a work device) is often more valuable than a cash fund split among eight team members.

4 weeks out: jury, mentors, and program

Assemble the jury based on the tasks. If the topics are product-focused, you need someone who looks at utility and the market, not just code cleanliness. Agree in advance on the evaluation criteria and how many minutes each team will get for their pitch. On Stavleak, the jury logs in through a separate portal and enters scores based on your criteria, and the platform sums them up automatically, making the finals transparent and free of manual calculations. We have a separate breakdown about the criteria themselves.

Mentors are more important than they seem. A single experienced developer who unblocks three stuck teams on Saturday night saves the quality of the finals. Invite two or three and set up a shift schedule.

AI is already at the venue, decide this in advance

Make a clear decision beforehand: what is your stance on AI. Today, participants code with Cursor, Claude, and Copilot anyway, so the question is not "whether to allow vibecoding," but "whether to give everyone equal access and how to evaluate it." If you distribute keys to the necessary APIs to participants, no one will lose due to an empty limit in the middle of the night. On Stavleak, access to sponsor APIs is distributed to participants right in their dashboard. We broke down how to run an AI-specific hackathon separately.

2 weeks out: communication and logistics

At this stage, everything is already planned; the only thing left is not to lose the participants. People drop out not because they changed their minds, but because they forgot or didn't understand where to go. This is where the platform helps: all registered users see the schedule and announcements, and reminders go straight to Telegram, so the touchpoint chain doesn't rely on your memory. A separate Q&A board eliminates the flood of identical direct messages.

On day X and after

Your task on the day of the event is not to program or rescue projects, but to keep the rhythm. Opening on time, clear deadlines, food arriving on time, and a fair pitch. Participants submit their projects through the submission form on the event page, the jury enters scores right there, and you publish the results and rankings immediately after evaluation. You can issue winner certificates in the very same panel.

Don't disappear after the finals. Gather anonymous feedback, share photos, and write to the winners. Your second hackathon will be much easier to organize if the first one left people with the feeling that everything was fair and decent.

Bring it all together in one place

If you don't want to piece a hackathon together from a website, Google Forms, evaluation spreadsheets, and a dozen chats, see how it works on a single platform. Request a Stavleak demo, and we'll show you how to run your event from page to awards quickly and without extra tools.