Last year we shared a bit about an internal hackathon we held in our office. The idea was simple: give the team time and space to experiment, build quickly, and see what new product ideas could emerge.
By the end of the hackathon we had two product demos.
Now, a little more than a year later, one of those ideas has turned into a real product that’s alive and on the market.
Looking back, the journey from hackathon prototype to an actual product wasn’t exactly straightforward. But that was never really the goal.
“One year sounds like a long time…”
Today, in the age of AI, a year can sound like an eternity when launching a product. If you spend enough time on LinkedIn, you might get the impression that products go from idea to launch overnight.
But our goal wasn’t to launch something as fast as possible.
Our goal was to experiment, learn, and pivot.
Our primary business is still an agency. That means the product wasn’t built in isolation - we were building it alongside client work, growing the team, and allocating resources to development where we could.
Most importantly, we were learning by doing.
Phase 1: The First Attempt
The first concept we explored after the hackathon was Instadraft.
Instadraft was an intelligent email helper, which drafts emails based on your past communications and knowledge base. We built an early demo and tried pushing it forward. Like many early ideas, it looked promising at first - but when we started validating it more seriously, the large scale demand simply wasn’t there.
That was our first reality check.
Instead of forcing the idea forward, we decided to step back and rethink the direction.
Phase 2: Discovering VoiceFill
The other demo we worked on during the hackathon was VoiceFill.
The idea was simple but interesting: using voice as an input method to fill out forms or structured data faster.
What caught our attention was the positioning. There weren’t many solutions tackling this problem in a focused way and the technology which allowed this to be possible was still relatively new. The potential use cases started to surface quickly.
We began having conversations, exploring where the technology could actually create real value.
Phase 3: The Pivot to VoiceFill Medical
One industry kept showing stronger signals than the others: healthcare.
That’s when VoiceFill evolved into VoiceFill Medical - a more focused product built specifically for medical workflows.
Instead of trying to solve a broad problem for everyone, we narrowed the scope and started building for a very specific use case.
Phase 4: From Prototype to Product
This phase was less about ideation and more about execution.
We refined the product, validated the workflows, improved the technology, and continued talking to potential users.
Slowly but steadily, the prototype matured into something real.
And eventually, it became a product we could actually launch.
What We Learned
A year later, the biggest takeaway isn’t just that a hackathon idea became a product.
It’s that the path from idea to product is rarely linear.
We tried things that didn’t work.
We changed direction more than once.
We kept building alongside our agency work.
But that process - trying, learning, and pivoting - is exactly what made the final product possible. And it started with an internal hackathon.
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