What is Start-a-thon?

Start-a-thon is a hackathon that is being organized under JITSIE(Jamsetji Tata Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship), IIT Madras and SIC(Startup Ignition Cell), RV Institutions. Students with exciting ideas for changing the world are encouraged to take part in it.

Start-a-thon will comprise of mentorship sessions from Wadhwani Foundation, followed by the building phase for participants to work on their ideas. In the end, the final round will be organized offline at RV College, Bangalore where the participants will be able to showcase their products to potential Angel Investors and win exciting prizes.

What is the Structure?

Hackathon Structure:

Registration Phase → Building Phase → Online Judging → Offline Pitching and Judging

  1. The Registration Phase will include the interested participants to register themselves on Devfolio. During this they will be filling out a questionnaire on what they would like to build during the hackathon(i.e. about their idea). Also, at this point of time we will be dividing the builders for the hackathon into the two tracks.
  2. After Application Review Period, The Building Phase will start. This will be held in Online Mode where builders will be developing on their ideas. In between, we have talks and sessions by industry experts on Entrepreneurship over the period of one month, mentoring the students on efficiently building out ideas. It would help a lot if there can be a few workshop sessions(online) by Solana guys on building out on Solana.
  3. Online Judging: We have seen a great interest from students at IITM BS Program and RV College and we are confident to attract a huge audience for this. Thus, we will need to filter out the best of the ideas for the offline event. After submitting the projects which are built in the building phase, We will be choosing top 30 around for the online pitching event.
  4. Finale Round: The top 15-20 projects will be invited to showcase their products to judges in-person at RV College Bangalore. In return, they may get funding for their project to keep building it further and cash prizes from our sponsors.

We are primarily having two tracks:

  1. Web 3.0 Track. - Focused on projects build on blockchain.
  2. Classic Tech Track. - Focused on non-blockchain projects - Web2 solutions/ Non-software solutions and others.