Guides
How to attract hackathon participants without wasting your advertising budget
Effective recruitment channels, why registration does not equal attendance, and how to retain people from start to finish.
Attracting hackathon participants involves two different tasks that everyone confuses. First: getting registrations. Second: getting those registered to the venue. Organizers invest in the first and ignore the second, and then wonder why only ninety people showed up out of three hundred applications. Let's break down both.
Where the participants actually hang out
Paid social media ads work poorly for hackathons because the audience is narrow and scattered. It is cheaper and more precise to go where developers and students are already gathered.
- Universities and their IT departments, student clubs, and dean's offices. A single announcement in the right chat yields more than a week of targeted ads.
- Thematic Telegram chats and channels dedicated to languages and technologies.
- Communities and past participants. Those who attended before will come again and bring their friends.
- Partner companies. Their developers and interns are a ready-made audience.
- Specialized platforms and hackathon directories where people actively search for events to attend.
Many lose free traffic on this last point. If your event is listed in the Stavleak hackathon directory, you will be found by those who were already looking for somewhere to go this coming weekend. These are registrations you didn't pay for with advertising.
Why registration does not equal attendance
Between "I registered" and "I showed up" lies a couple of weeks, during which a person has time to change their mind, forget, and make other plans. Your job is to keep that gap warm.
- Immediately after registration, send the details and add the person to the general chat.
- A week before, send a reminder with the schedule and answers to "what to bring with you."
- A day before the start, send a short, energetic message with the meeting point and timing.
It sounds cliché, but this exact sequence raises attendance from 30% to 60% and higher. On Stavleak, this doesn't rely on your memory: all participants see the schedule and announcements, and reminders are sent to Telegram as the event progresses. People drop out because of silence, not because of a bad event.
Call things by their proper names
If coding with AI is allowed and encouraged, say so directly in the announcement. Events where vibe coding is not swept under the rug but declared as the norm are currently gathering audiences faster because that is exactly what people expect. And the team search board removes the common beginner's blocker "I have no one to go with": a person finds a team even before the start and is much more likely to show up.
What to write to get people to register
Don't sell a "unique opportunity." Answer the specific questions spinning in the participant's head: what will I get, how much time will it take, who will be on my team, is it realistic to win if I'm a junior. Honest text without hype converts better than exclamation marks.
Show past projects, photos, and reviews. It is easier for a person to decide when they see that others just like them have already come here before and were satisfied. You can set up your event and get into the directory via the Stavleak demo.