$1 Sprint Hackathon | Venture UWA + Civic Hackers

The event takes place Friday 2pm-5pm where the participants will work through the challenge in the Venture UWA space. Students go away and work on this over the weekend if they choose then we have an event on Monday to come and present what they were able to build 4-5pm. 

What is a $1 Sprint? The $1 Sprint is an alternative to the traditional hackathon. Where hackathons optimise for the pitch, the $1 Sprint optimises for revenue. The $1 Sprint teaches participants the critical importance of achieving product-market fit by making them earn their first dollar from a real customer. There’s no subjective judging, no pitches, no ambiguous metrics - just proof of payment.

How it works Civic Hackers facilitates each $1 Sprint to create an exciting and fun environment for the dash to the revenue finish line. To help ease participants into the energy of the Sprint, Civic Hackers structures the event into four phases:

1. Customer Hypotheses Participants are encouraged to think about what people might want to buy for $1? At that price the pain points a product is resolving can be very small, opening a whole new range of customers and solutions.


2. Build Quick: Using modern tools like v0, Replit, Bolt, Lovable and Claude Code, participants rapidly design and build a sellable product - a PDF, a Notion template or even a micro-SaaS.


3. Launch Fast: The goal is to get the product in front of real buyers. Participants set up a public checkout through Stripe, PayPal, Gumroad or similar.


4. Flearn & Pivot: No bites? Pivot. Try a new marketing technique or rethink the product. Failure is encouraged - if you learn from it. The Sprint rewards iteration, not perfection.