Results from our 1st Hackathon: Everything We Built in 48 Hours

I owe a lot of my early career success to hackathons.

My very first one was DubHacks in Seattle. I showed up not knowing what a hackathon actually was, and definitely not knowing how to write code. I met a rag-tag group of strangers at the event, we teamed up, and somehow ended up winning the whole thing.

Then the same thing happened at HackingEDU in San Francisco. And again at the Facebook Global Hackathon Finals. To be clear: I got lucky with great teammates (I was mostly a bystander). But the lesson stuck with me: take the leap, build something scrappy in a weekend, and good things tend to follow.

So last week, we ran that same experiment with the entire Supademo team. We booked out a house in Toronto, flew everyone in, and kicked off our first-ever company hackathon: 48 hours, six teams, no roadmap, no backlog. Just build the thing you wish existed in Supademo.

Anyone can hack now

Here’s what’s changed since my student hackathon days: the barrier to building something real in a day has never been lower.

That completely changed who got to shine. Engineers were pitching to a room. GTM folks were crushing code. CS and support were shipping completely novel solutions the rest of us would never have thought of. It made this the most equal (and honestly the most interesting) hackathon I’ve ever been part of.

And beyond what we built, it was an incredible injection of energy and morale into the team. A lot of what was built will never see the light of day. But some of these features might end up being the most consequential ones on our journey to $10M ARR. Who knows.

Feature demos of what was built

Edit on-screen data before recording

A Chrome extension that lets you mock and personalize frontend data with AI before recording a demo, no devs or code changes needed.

Voice-controlled recording extension

Narrate out loud as you record a demo, and your speech gets converted into a cleaned-up, cloned AI voiceover for each step.

URL → interactive demo

Type in a URL and it ingests your website and automatically generates an interactive demo of it, complete with steps, AI text, and AI voiceovers.

In-app onboarding tour builder

A simple and modern product tour builder with recorded videos or AI Avatars that overlay and play for each step or action you want the user to take.

Multiple theme presets per workspace

Save and switch between brand themes across your workspace.

Bulk personalized demo share links

Generate hundreds of personalized share links at once from a CSV upload or directly from your CRM.

Custom pointer designs for hotspots

Wrap the default pointer for custom designs that match your brand and use case.

Demos → knowledge base docs

Transform interactive demos into knowledge base docs and articles automatically.

Presenter mode with speaker notes and GIF preview in emails

Internal presenter notes separated from what the viewer sees on screen, plus theme presets for presenting. In addition, an animated GIF preview of your demo that can be embedded directly into emails.

Personalized onboarding and extension health check

Onboarding that adapts to who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish, instead of one generic flow for everyone.

Next, a diagnostic that verifies the Supademo extension is installed and healthy before you record, so nothing silently fails mid-capture.

Demo use case preview tool

A tool that analyzes your existing website and domain and suggests where you could find ROI by embedding or leveraging interactive demos, along with previews on what this would look like.

Talking-head overlays on interactive demos

Record and add a talking head video on top of existing interactive demo steps.

Quiz gating + voiceover text export

Interactive quiz steps that gate progress within a demo, plus the ability to export voiceover text from demos.

A new inline hotspot editor

Edit hotspots directly inline on a demo, no more jumping in and out of the editor.

The future of hackathons at Supademo

I went in hoping for a morale boost and a few fun prototypes. We came out with sixteen working features, a much tighter team, and a bunch of roadmap debates we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

It was such a smashing success that we’re now planning to run one every quarter. If you’re on the fence about running a hackathon at your company: do it. Book a house, clear two days, and let people build outside their job descriptions. The tooling has never made it easier, and you’ll be surprised who ends up shipping the thing everyone talks about.

And if you want to see what a small team can build in 48 hours... well, you just did.