UXHack 2024 recap & takeaways

Another year went by. It's time for another reflection post :)

I had penned down a recap of 2023. So, I will try to follow the same format of highlighting key moments from our 2024 journey and what I look forward to in 2025.

This year was less about launches (hope to change this in the coming year) and more about doing things more consistently (that's way harder!)

What we accomplished in 2024:

• Crossed 50+ editions of Weekend Hackathons:
  • Really proud that our users have really adopted to this format.
  • Infact, our first WhatsApp group hit the1025 member ceiling. And the second group is about to cross 300 soon
• Crossed 50+ editions of TGIF Quiz
• Published 50+ editions of our Newsletter Mixology
  • Also got our first sponsor The Interaction Design Foundation. Couldn't have asked for a better sponsor to start monetization.
• Launched Social Job feeds for Product & Design jobs
• And we crossed a psychological milestone of 10k+ members on UXHack

What didn't go as planned

• We had planned to double down on our hiring offerings. It didn't work out as we expected. Must admit, it is a tough sell
  • While we did worked with few startups to help them reach out to our base, but what we really want to solve doesn't seems a product problem
  • Hence, not much motivated to sell this offering. However, we do plan to definitely do hiring events
• No new events
  • Personally this was a big let down as we have so many event formats thought through but never came to execute it

Plans for 2025

• Gen AI at UXHack: This was the highlight of 2024 for me. With advancements in Gen AI, we adopted LLM models to ship faster for our clients. At the same time, it helped save costs for us and our clients.
  • With this learning, we are now confident of leveraging it for our B2B and B2C product offerings as well.
• Enhancements to Weekend Hackathons: A good news for folks who take part in WH. Some of the feature requests like viewing all submissions, enabling feedback and more is now in the pipeline. In fact a lot of work has already been done. Just need to fine tune few things before we can launch this.
• Launching new events: We plan to take our learnings from WH structure and use that to launch more events. We have a few ideas. Though will not over-commit. We hope to execute at least one of them if not all :)

On this note, wishing everyone a great 2025. Keep learning and growing (hopefully with us. pun intended)