This was my second hackathon. We had several days to build instead of one afternoon, and the team already knew how to work together, so I felt more comfortable this time.
The theme was elections, so we built a blockchain voting system. Made sense on paper: elections need transparency, blockchain gives you an immutable ledger. We learned Solidity, wired up smart contracts, and I spent most of my time on the frontend trying to make voting feel clean and simple.
The problem was that the blockchain became the entire project. We spent so much effort getting it to work that we forgot to ask what made ours different. Presentation day answered that for us: several other teams also built blockchain voting systems. Different UI, different contracts, same product.
Looking back, the mistake wasn’t choosing blockchain. Elections are still one of the few places it actually makes sense. The mistake was assuming blockchain was the innovation by itself. It’s just a database with different tradeoffs, and nobody claps because you used one, the same way nobody claps today just because you used AI. What people remember is what your product does that nobody else’s does.
Ironically, none of the blockchain projects placed. The ones that won used AI instead, not because AI made them better, but because it was the new shiny thing that year. A few years later it would’ve been AI agents.
The technology changes. The mistake doesn’t: teams fall in love with a technology before they fall in love with a problem, and build “an AI app” or “a blockchain app” instead of something that actually needs that technology to solve a specific problem. When everyone reaches for the same shiny thing, nobody stands out.
I’ve carried that into every project since. Whenever I catch myself thinking “this would be cool with AI,” I ask a different question: if I removed the shiny thing entirely, would anyone still care about the product? If the answer is no, I don’t have a product yet.