hi, my name is Zan and i've won 18x and lost almost 100+ contests and i share my journey of building products and getting reviews while also helping folks like me make it better
today i learnt something very useful and i cannot wait to share with you how you can win by using an unfair advantage
first off i attended an IRL contest as off 23th May 2026 and I saw great people build amazing project for a track that was about online shopping for a clothing brand.
they provided us with api endpoints, and instructions. we were tasked to build a user facing online shop in 80 mins
and after some back and forth i got it complete submitted but lost btw and i learnt alot from the winning teams
the lessons are as follows:
they went beyond normal shopping app to working ai inspired size matching where users can find their size by uploading their picture they could also add a virtual try on
The second winner did something amazing that blew my mind
he integrated tiktok style dopamine ui to the shopping interface so users can doom scroll through the clothings just like they do on tiktok which felt much native
now let me break down the workflow behind this creative output brick by brick.
everyone built a working app that pulled data from the api, but they stopped there and i called this stage the first baseline of the equation , i see it as a triangle with 3 divisions
and with each stage of the division the competition becomes stronger for those that did the same thing , followed the same vertical, thought the same way but for the highly creative ones they make a huge difference, they make it past that stage because their value and approach is non-negotiable and they never compete, they declare themselves as eligible and take their place
one thing became clear to me that to win you must blend in 3 verticals into one that feels natively simple to use,
the actual thing(what seems obvious like fetching an api)
what seems like a rollup on top of the api( may be the ui or how you designed it)
this should be your power center where you give a huge gap to those that stop at [2] this is where you either blend in a native experience that is known in another world to be obvious but not in the context of what you're doing but will relate to anyone if they try it for the first time, look at common experiences add them
to conclude, you need to thing outside of the box , you need to be retardmaxing, playmaxing never stop improving the product, get out of your brain, don't let your domain limit your taste and empathy to solve a problem
remember this at all cost if they give you an api , give them an experience that has never been made too obvious but seems obvious in natural sense
thank you
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