How we won at ETHIndia'23

The first 2 hours are pure excitement, it's finally begun- you find your idea, your niche. You manage to convince your team on the usability of your product and you're off to the races.

Next 5 hours, You hit your first hurdle, rethink your sponsor tracks, and question your initial idea. Your teammate hits a bump. with a certain integration/ technical challenge. You're thrown off your track. But it's no sweat, head in the game.

You get a jump scare and start counting your hours, 42 more, 41 more, 40 left. You start to feel some pains that weren't there before, but you're fine. You think to yourself, If I can maintain the pace and stability I can break my personal record, ship a complete end-to-end solution within the 50 hours.

Next 10 hours in, you start to believe you'll reach the end goal, piece of cake, you got this. You get going on some caffeine and nicotine, but it's all good, you can power through the travel exhaustion because your time in Bangalore is limited.

It's 9 pm now, feels like it's 3am, you all share a sad dinner rethinking your presence, the body pains kick in, the motivation seems dimmer as you take the next bite of your dinner, maybe a short nap, you see a hundred-people lined up on the mattress and think, it wouldn't hurt if I layed down for a while right? Calm the brain, forget my problems of implementation for a while.

No, the team's working, the devs who came from all over the world are on the bean bags, you take a second look at your ETHIndia bracelet. You're back in the game.

"Alright, huddle up, we got an odd 30 hours left, how do we make the best out of the V1 we currently have?" Initiates a 2 hour long discussion that seems to complicate the problem further than it solves.

You decide to walk over some booths, try your luck at getting some swags, and strike up a conversation with one of the sponsors at the event regarding your idea. That's it, with the help of their expertise, you now have direction, you now have a idea that you can actually build within the remaining timeframe, mix in with a killer pitch and you're a winner.

You grind for the next 20 hours, the work is distributed, the horses are off to the races, you feel a little dizzy, but your head's in the game. Grab a bit of caffiene, some nicotine, back to the races again. Grab a bit of caffiene, some nicotine, back again. And again.

It's 7 am on a Sunday, unlike your usual weekends, you've completed a v1.2 of your product thats ready to be shipped as a POC (proof-of-concept) now.

That's when it really hits you, you're exhausted, your face looks like a bad buffet. Your outfit now stinks of sweat. But you've got something on your localhost on port 3000 that's making you smile.

It's breakfast time, you laugh over a cup of coffee on how you were about to give up on the crazy idea you've built up now. Back to the races, but a different game this time, you got to make your killer pitch video and upload it to YouTube.

You rush to the washroom, spray some water on your hair, rub it hard with a tissue, force it to be presentable, back to the workstation.

You start recording, "Hey folks, I'm Gyanesh and this is my team --- , what is the name of our team?" "Hey folks, I'm Gyanesh, with team GPT and this is our submission to ETHIndia 2022, ah 2023." "We present to you CrossDrop, your- " Bhai tagline decide nahi kiya

After 30 mins of struggling to talk to the camera, you finally set in your script. Here's the outcome of straight 40-42 hours (?) of no sleep

CrossDrop

Now that you've submitted your initial pitch, it's time to prepare yourself for the judging. Now here's the hard part, so far, you've tested everything on your local environment, but the judging requires you to publish everything on a live website, so now, you're stuck at the deployment, trying to scrape together your frontend and backend to work together.

The clock hits 11, and you are hit with a buzz in your chest, you can barely get to the water bottle itself. You wash your face, drink some water, caffeine, nicotine, back to the races.

Here comes the challenging part, even if you're building something in deep tech, you always have to present your pitch in something like 4 mins, depending on which sponsor you are presenting to, you need to tailor your pitch in that direction. One size fits all, just ain't true here.

Now you're done with the judging, you manage to scrape through all the pitches with a smile, hiding away all your pain and anguish from the sleeplessness, but the sudden human interaction has propelled a new energy within you. You are excited to showcase your usecase and the tech to people who are genuinely interested to know more about it.

You stood through the lines of judging, demonstrated your project successfully to a bunch of people. Now it's time to wait. You just find the nearest bean bag and (possibly) pass out.

It's almost 5, you catch up with your friends, get to know some more people, say goodbye to a few who are leaving early, that's when it strikes, the grandstand opens up and the winner declaration is about to begin

But wait---

There's some singing, some cheering, a few short speeches to wake everyone up before the judging results are showcased. But first, the demo's of the finalist teams.

There were 13 Finalists this year, who presented their projects in front of everyone.

Finally, the moment shines, you read as fast as your eyes can through the sponsor prizes, and there it is.

All your efforts for the past 50 odd hours are worth it now. You feel the peace to fall asleep on your way back to Delhi after a awesome weekend of Builder Energy.

Kudos to Priyadarsh S S Siddhardha Varma K for pulling through all 50 hours and being an amazing team. Couldn't have done it without Divya Ranjan . 🙏 Literal God. Lastly, Kudos to all the builders, would love to hear and connect with you guys! Hosted by Devfolio , Ethereum Foundation Mention - The Arbitrum Foundation Thanks for travelling to KTPO to meet us - Eshaan Bhardwaj , Ratanshi Puri

CrossDrop

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