My First Hackathon – 24 Hours, 1 Fintech App, 0 Sleep (Spoiler: We won a Special Mention too 🏆)

So yeah — I finally did it.

Attended my first ever hackathon. Not virtually, not as a ghost registrant. I actually showed up, with real humans, real deadlines, and real panic. It was Business Hackathon 2.0, and we had 24 hours to build something, pitch it, maybe cry a little, and call it innovation.

We built a fintech app called SpendSight — more on that in a sec — and ended up winning a Special Mention Award. Which, let me tell you, felt like getting the "most likely to accidentally build a startup" badge.

But let's rewind.

📅 Day 1 — Chaos Enters the Chat

The idea was simple: Take those horrendous PDF bank statements, feed them into our app, and magically get back clean, categorized, human-readable insights in csv — without ever touching Excel.
Because to be honest, those bank statements pdfs are generated by banks for banks and not for us average joe

We had:

• No backend yet
• A half-baked frontend skeleton
• 2 people who definitely Googled "how to parse PDFs in Python" at some point

So naturally we said:

"Let's go regex → BERT → LLM fallback, just for fun."

Because sleep is for cowards.

💡 Enter SpendSight

Here's what we shipped:

• 📄 Upload bank statements (yes, A mock one for now)
• 🧠 Parse them using Regex first, BERT if that fails, and DeepSeek R1 if we really needed backup
• 📊 Output a clean, searchable table
• 📁 Export as CSV
• 🏷️ Auto-categorize expenses (food, rent, subscriptions, etc.)
• 🚀 React + TypeScript frontend, Python + Supabase backend
• 💬 Bonus - Chat with your statements using AI At 3 AM, it actually worked. And by "worked" I mean: didn't crash on first upload. A victory.

Pro tip: If you finish coding at 3 AM at a hackathon, all the sleeping mats are already claimed by the smart people who went to bed at midnight. So what do you do? You clump six tables together under the AC, declare it "premium real estate," and sleep like kings. Was it comfortable? Absolutely not. Did we feel like hackathon legends? 100%.

🛠️ Bonus Side Quest: AdHacks

At midnight, we were invited to this mini side event called AdHacks. They said "Make a compelling ad for your product."

We said, "It's 12 am but sure, what's the worst that could happen?"

So we scripted, shot (with Gemini Veo), and pitched an ad — half asleep, full throttle. Weirdly, it turned out great. Probably because none of us had the energy to overthink. - Finished at 2:30 am , ofc didn't win the mini event.

(Fun fact: Our "creative brainstorming session" happened while one teammate was brushing his teeth and another was doing skincare. Peak innovation right there.)

🎤 Final Pitch – Please Clap

The next day, running on cold chai and adrenaline, we gave our final pitch:

• 🖥️ Live website demo
• 📑 Pitch deck with actual numbers [yeah, we did the RESEARCH]
• 💬 Business use case and monetisation model

Was it perfect? Nah. Was it scrappy, ambitious, and kinda awesome? Absolutely.

(Also, shoutout to whoever invented dry shampoo — the real MVP of hackathons. And to the person who brought deodorant. You know who you are[ME].)

The judges saw potential. We walked out with a Special Mention Award and one hell of a story.

🧠 What I Learned

• You can do a lot in 24 hours if no one sleeps
• Ideas > perfection
• PDFs are evil. Regex is therapy
• Teamwork is everything
• Always keep a pitch deck AND a backup charger
• Six tables + one AC = acceptable sleeping arrangements (your back will disagree)
• 3 AM is when the best (worst?) coding decisions happen
• Cold chai tastes like liquid motivation when you haven't slept

📍 Try SpendSight (Frontend MVP)

🔗 Live Demo: https://tinyurl.com/spendsight

🧠 GitHub: Zenoguy/SpendSight-

🫡 TL;DR

First hackathon = scary. Building something in 24 hours = madness. Winning a Special Mention = chef's kiss.

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What was your first hackathon experience like? Drop a comment below — I'd love to hear your stories! 👇

Comments

[WLeah]

Congratulations on your win!! I've taken part in only one hackathon which was last year, couldnt help out with coding much but they were nice enough to let me edit intro videos for them. Never tried one in person though, I would like to one day though. It sounds like a lot of fun, sounds a bit daunting too but mostly fun. That's very impressive! Well done again for getting the Special Mention Award !👏👏

[Snehan Chakraborty]

Its amazing

[Shreyan Ghosh]

thanks