Winning TechCrunch Disrupt London

I had never been to a Hackathon before last month. I have always missed out these events, but this time it sounded a good a idea to head to London for the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon with Antonio Marino to hack on something. 

 

I had no idea of what I wanted to build or how we could manage to get something done in less than 15 hours, but I knew something. I wanted to work with React Native. I have been using this framework for the last six months and after shipping an iOS and Android app for a Manchester based startup called CANDDi, I have realised how fast it can be.

We knew React Native could have given us the chance to build a Minimum Viable Product in a few hours, even without an extensive iOS knowledge.

After the first two hours of brainstorming, we chose to compete for the William Hill Sponsor Prize, which included a World VIP Tour to Las Vegas, Sidney and Madrid. The betting company was providing their API to review matches, retrieve data, use their platform and place bets.

By conceptually thinking about the Robinhood app, which lets you sell or buy stock when a price is met, and even Workflow, which enables users to set specific workflows of apps, we came up with IFBet.

IFBet is a React Native iOS application that lets the users place bets only when certain conditions are met. A condition could be:

“If it’s raining in Manchester, Rooney is playing and has scored in the previous game, bet £15 on the away team.”

The interface lets you build simple flows by dragging and dropping blocks of conditions and statements. Since the app uses a blocks structure and simple if->then conditions, the possibilities are endless.

After 15hrs we managed to get a prototype working and presented it on stage (watch the video) in front of 500 hackers. We had more or less a dozen teams competing for this sponsor prize, but our project was by far on another level. That’s why we now have a nice graduation summer trip around the world. 😉

Edoardo Moreni, Mark Larah, Bartłomiej Siemieniuk and Antonio Marino.

 

 

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