How I participated in the TON Telegram hackathon and what came of it

Hello! Vlad Kalashnikov is at the keyboard, Senior Product Designer at the Re:Luna startup, before that he worked at MTS and Pinkman. I have been doing digital design for 6 years and product design for 4 years. Also the author Telegram channel Design Mind.

Recently, TON announced a large hackathon with a prize pool of 2 million USDT and bootcamps dedicated to it in many cities around the world, including Tbilisi, where I am. I decided to take part in one of these bootcamps in Tbilisi and in this article I would like to share my experience.

Short

If you don't want to waste time reading the detailed version, you can check out short version in my telegram channel.

Description of the hackathon

The main task was to create a mini-app in Telegram with TON integration.

Tracks for work:

Onboarding and games. In short, TON supports large onboarding systems and is looking for projects with referral mechanisms and social games to easily attract new users to crypto.
Social Web3. TON is looking for social B2C apps inside Telegram with a clear plan to achieve virality and user retention. This includes SocialFi for content monetization and community and brand management tools such as loyalty programs and ticketing
DeFi. These are blockchain-based financial services that operate without traditional banks, using smart contracts for direct transactions between users. This allows people to borrow, earn interest, and trade assets without intermediaries.
E-comm. Telegram and TON need more Web3-enabled shopping apps that redistribute value to users. No-code tools for creating stores in Telegram that are fully integrated with TON out of the box — like Shopify, but in a mini-app

What you had to pay attention to during development:

Benefits for the TON ecosystem
Mass scale of the product
Potential for monetization
Referral system
Easy to dive and use

Criteria for evaluation

Below you can see a photo with the evaluation criteria or read them via the link on the website.

Team

As I mentioned earlier, this was my first experience participating in a hackathon, and I went there without a team. After writing a few words about myself in the chat, I announced the search for a team. Misha, Lead Flutter Developer from an American startup, answered me, and we agreed to meet in a coworking space in the evening for brainstorming. Then Misha contacted Sasha and Anya, and we formed a team. We ended up working together just 4 days before the start of the hackathon.

As a result, we have assembled an interesting team:

I – cool designer
Misha — Lead Flutter Developer at an American startup
Anya — CPO & Product in an American startup of a women’s health tracker
Sasha — founder and full-stack developer. She and Anya organized more than 50 hackathons in the Russian Federation

How we came up with ideas

We got together in a cafe over the weekend and started coming up with ideas, starting from the following points:

Benefits for the TON ecosystem
Mass scale of the product
Potential for monetization
Referral system
Easy to dive and use

How we brainstormed:

I got all the information about the hackathon

Suggested to create Figma Jam Board
We set a timer for 20 minutes and each of us wrote about 10 ideas separately.
We then exchanged ideas and each participant put stars on the ideas of other participants that they liked.
We chose ideas that had more than 2 stars and started discussing them

I created a table that helped us organize our ideas.

Distributed responsibilities among team members

Made a Gantt chart. Spoiler: it didn't reflect reality at all.

Ideas we had and why we abandoned them

Voting-betting. The idea is that it’s like telegram polls, but when you vote, you bet money, and in the end everything works like betting. We abandoned the idea because there are competitors and this is gambling, which is not very good
Mental Health Tomagotchi. An application that you log into regularly every day, do tasks that can help you improve your mental well-being, earn tokens, and you have a Tamagotchi that reflects your mental well-being. We abandoned the idea because the MVP version needed a lot of work, and we wouldn’t have time to implement it, but the idea is cool
Token Hunt. An analogue of Product Hunt, where you can view new tokens, as well as collections of “token of the day”, “token of the week”, etc. We abandoned the idea because the product would not have been very popular
Personal assistant. Many people use saved messages in TG as notes. We wanted to create an assistant that would analyze messages sent to it and create reminders or to-do lists. I don’t remember why we abandoned the idea
NFT gifts. It would have been possible to give limited NFT gifts to users. They could have been designed as figurines, something similar to Funko Pop. Refused, since NFTs are not so popular anymore, and it would have been necessary to use figurines that do not have copyright
Pedometer. An application in which you can see how many steps you have taken, compete with friends, receive tokens for won competitions, as well as achievements. To be honest, I don’t remember why we abandoned the idea

In the end, 1 day before the hackathon, we still didn’t have a final idea selected, and I was a little disappointed, because I thought that we would at least have a finished prototype by the first day. We decided to relax a little the day before the hackathon and choose an idea on the spot.

What idea did you choose?

We came to the hackathon, and we finally managed to choose an idea. Anya suggested making a women's cycle tracker with the ability to earn tokens, and we thought this idea was super cool because:

Women who use TON are about 28%, but also, according to statistics, about 80% of all purchases on the Internet are made by women. Women who use TON are about 28%. According to statistics, about 80% of all online purchases are made by women
About 5 million users use a similar cycle tracking mini-app on VK
We have Anya on our team, who holds the position of CPO in a startup with a similar topic, so we have expertise
Anya said that in America there is concern about the security of their data. Using blockchain, we could ensure complete anonymity
Telegram is also used in India and Africa, and we could allow women to earn money by doing simple actions in the app, such as marking a period, subscribing to a channel, taking a survey or sharing a link to the app.

Based on all of the above, we can bring women into the world of cryptocurrency, which will be useful for TON and will increase the female audience. In addition, such a tracker will be easily accessible in the messenger and convenient for the women themselves.

Day 1 of the hackathon: lectures and networking + photos from the hackathon

The hackathon itself took place in the center of Tbilisi in a hotel. The schedule for the first day looked like what you can see on the screenshot. Almost the entire day was spent in lectures, with coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and time for networking. At 20:00 we were shown where we could work, and we got to work. I worked until 22:00 and went home. During all 3 days at home I hardly worked.

I also met a couple of guys at the hackathon. I was looking for designers, but there were very few of them. I think out of 280 people there were maybe 10, and I only met three.

By the way, special respect for the food. The food was quite tasty. And they also gave us cool merch in the form of a T-shirt, stickers and a notebook.

Day 2 of the hackathon: work on the design, detailed product screenshots and explanation of functions

The schedule looked like this, but we spent the entire day working on the project.

So, we spent the entire second day working hard on the project:

I got into design
Misha worked on smart contracts
Sasha developed a presentation for pitching and started developing
Anya thought out the tokenomics and helped with the presentation

What design did you get?

We get 2 main pages

Disclaimer: we are still thinking through tokenomics and there may be problems

Home. This page contains:

Section with days until period/ovulation. This is a standard block in all similar applications
Section with the current balance of tokens
Section with channel subscription with the ability to receive tokens. When subscribing to a channel, the user receives tokens
Section with completing surveys with the opportunity to receive tokens. When completing a survey, the user earns tokens

Calendar page, where you can:

View previous and estimated future dates of monthly cycles
Change your period date

The design process

To begin with, I analyzed the features that Flo has and took screenshots of the entire application and we determined which features should be in our MVP

Assembled a prototype

Found references. I wanted to make an app with rich colors and rounded grotesque elements to convey Web3 modernity and comfort

Collected a design concept

Assembled UI-Kit. There was no time for neat design, but all components are assembled as correctly as possible for ease of use

Put together a presentation for pitching

6. I even managed to make banners for social networks and design the Telegram Apps Centre

I also had a couple of ideas for the future of the app and I also prototyped these functions.

It turned out that the main work on the design was completed by the end of the second day, and by the third day all that was left was to finish off some small details.

Day 3 of the hackathon: refinement and pitching, what place did you take?

The presentation with the project had to be sent by 13:30, and we did it. Then the pitching began, where about 70 teams presented for 3-4 minutes.

We were just a little short of being in the top 3 finalists, and we were called almost before the announcement of the finalists. I think we took about 4th or 5th place. After the award ceremony, Vladimir Afelman (Ton Foundation Community Development Manager) and a member of the jury expressed a desire to contact our team to discuss further development of the product. I am not upset about the place, as this was my first experience. I got a lot of emotions, a great team and we were able to create an interesting product, which we continue to work on now and plan to launch soon.

This is us with the jury members — This is me and the jury members.

Following the awards there was a Wrap-Up Party with wine and appetizers.

What's next and my impressions

This local hackathon was part of the larger TON hackathon with a prize pool of 2 million USDT. We had a week to finalize our product and apply to participate in the main hackathon. We coped with this task. Next, our plan is to bring the product to its final form and launch it.

I really enjoyed this hackathon and want to continue participating in events like this, even online, for several reasons: