Workshops / Tutorials
Onboarding makers is usually the most challenging part of hackathons and online events. Not everyone enters at the same level of knowledge and skill. Most participating hackers are bitcoin developers who build in their spare time, designers, and project managers. To help them learn and accelerate their onboarding process into building successful products, we recommend hosting online workshops and events from industry professionals.
You can focus your workshops and tutorials on specific topics that match your event description (e.g. Nostr), helping participants achieve your desired end goal or outcome. For example, if the goal of your event is to onboard 100 new developers into lightning web development, consider hosting workshops around topics like WebLN, LNURL, WebBTC, etc.
Development Workshops #
Development workshops provide hackers with more information and training on how to implement particular software, or combine multiple to solve a problem. These workshops are very technical and require some prior understanding of other coding languages or tech stacks. Developer workshops are a great way for companies to onboard new talent into their own ecosystem and open-source community.
Here is an example of a development workshop.
Development topics include:
- How to set up your local developer environment
- How to use {Company X}’s API
- How to use tailwind styleguides
- How to build on Bitcoin’s testnet
- Bootstrapping liquidity into your lightning web app
Design Workshops #
The design of applications often plays a huge role in the successful adoption of technologies, ideas, and concepts. At our virtual events, we place a huge importance on design and encourage event organisers to do the same by hosting design sprints and workshops for all types of hackers (designers, developers, PMs). This way you will attract a wide range of talent to your event and you will have a diverse set of opinions during the early planning phase of your product life cycles. To quote Christoph Ono, “design is a great planning tool.”, and can help teams formulate ideas and align their efforts towards building a specific feature, application, or solution. We agree with you, Christoph!
Here is an example of a design workshop.
Design topics include:
- How to use Figma
- How to plan your MVP build
- How to use design kits & UI libraries
- How to build a working design prototype
- How to test your product on users and get fast results
Growth Hacking Workshops #
Growth hacking, or business development, is an essential piece of the product lifecycle. If you’re looking to encourage participants to take their projects beyond their initial ideation and concept phases and to build an actual product or business, then these workshop types are important.
Here is an example of a growth hacking workshop
Growth Hacking topics include:
- Problem Definition & Value Proposition
- Product Market Fit & MVP
- Go-to-Market Strategy
- Branding & Marketing Strategy
Funding Workshops & Deal Rooms #
If your hackathon or event looks to encourage participants to form teams around longer-term, sustainable projects, we recommend providing some workshops on how to approach funding. This could be through forms of private investment, such as equity or shared ownership, VC funding, or grants and crowdfunding. If the project will look to raise capital, it would be worthwhile to provide further information on company formation and incorporation.
What’s more, you can even connect participants to investors directly through Deal Rooms or ‘Pitch Days’. These give hackers and founders the opportunity to pitch their projects to funding experts in order to receive valuable feedback for future meetings or to invest directly into their ideas.
Funding topics include:
- How to build your pitch deck and business plan
- How to approach investors
- How to incorporate your business
- How to decide equity amounts and deal structures
- How to raise funds through grants