What Is Stage 0?

Stage 0 is a full-day, validation-only hackathon where, instead of building, participants identify problems and conduct validation research to make the most credible case possible to the judges that they've identified a real problem that is significant to the people who experience it and has a venture-scale market.

I. What Is Stage 0?

Stage 0 is a full-day, validation-only hackathon where, instead of building, participants identify problems and conduct validation research to make the most credible case possible to the judges that they've identified a real problem that is significant to the people who experience it and has a venture-scale market.

Stage 0 currently runs quarterly in Manila, Philippines.

II. Why Host a Hackathon Where No One Builds Anything?

Recent startup post-mortems conducted by CB Insights continue to show that poor product-market fit is a recurring underlying cause of failure. Stage 0 is designed to help participants challenge problem and market assumptions before they begin building.

We have found that:

• +The problem founders often face isn't building; it's building the right thing to solve the right problem, for the right people.
• +It is common for founders to build before they have enough evidence to justify building.
• +Founders often build based on unvalidated ideas, then anchor to those ideas.
• +While problem validation is one of the most important things early-stage founders should do, it is also one of the most commonly overlooked and poorly executed.
• +Traditional startup programs and hackathons encourage founders to build, but not to ask if what they are building should be built.
• +Pitch competitions reward founders for being polished and good at presentations, not for determining whether they have an actual venture-scale problem that's painful or not.

We believe many of the most important aspects of building a startup aren't visible, exciting, or sexy. This causes founders to prioritize the more visible work like building. This also results in program providers prioritizing the more visible activities such as demo days and pitch competitions. You are then left with founders who, in some cases, have spent years attempting to build startups without ever developing the core founder capabilities needed in areas such as problem validation, user research, and making continue-or-kill decisions. However, these founders have spent years cycling through numerous accelerators, incubators, hackathons, and pitch competitions.

We want to help founders begin developing the core capabilities necessary for success. We want founders to learn how to conduct rigorous problem validation to determine whether they've identified a problem worth building a solution for before they build anything. We want to push founders to embrace the non-sexy, often boring parts of building an early-stage startup that will play a significant role in whether it succeeds or fails.

III. How Does Stage 0 Work?

Over the course of 12 hours, participants get to know each other, form teams, work with their teams to identify problems, and conduct validation research.

The competition portion of the hackathon itself is broken into two rounds. During the first round, teams identify and define multiple problems and begin initial research to determine which problems they believe can make it through round 2 validation.

At the conclusion of round 1, each team presents the one problem they believe has the greatest potential and are judged on the clarity and coherence of the problem, the quality of the initial evidence they used to justify moving the problem to validation instead of killing it, the rationale used to determine what would have caused them to kill the problem, and their ability to identify the remaining uncertainty and riskiest assumptions with their problems.

Only six teams move from round 1 to round 2, with all other teams being eliminated. The six teams that move forward spend the remainder of the hackathon conducting validation research to gather as much evidence as they can to make the strongest possible case that the problem is real, it is extremely significant to the people impacted by it, and there is a large market for anyone solving it.

Round 2 ends with the six remaining teams presenting their validation work to the judges, who assess the strength and quality of their evidence, their ability to explicitly identify the assumptions that needed to be validated, and their ability to update their beliefs as they conducted validation.

IV. Stage 0 Prizes

• +First place prize: ₱50k
• +Second place prize: ₱30k
• +Third place prize: ₱10k

V. Past Stage 0 Winners

VI. Past Stage 0 Datapoints