Mastermind · March 9, 2026
The flagship is the hackathon, not the product launch
The sentence that tripped me up on this week's call was that the flagship is the hackathon, not the product launch. It sounds obvious once you say it. It took me a month to actually act like I believed it.
I'd been running the last few weeks with two parallel stories in my head. Story one: we're building MentorMates, the product, and we'll have a big launch moment at some point in Q2 that puts it on the map. Story two: we're running a massive hackathon in Hong Kong in July, a thousand participants, biggest in the region, with MentorMates underneath. The implicit ordering in my head had story one in front and story two behind.
Xisen flipped the order on me. If you're running the biggest hackathon in Hong Kong in July, and a thousand builders are going to use MentorMates end-to-end for forty-eight hours, the event is the launch. The product doesn't need a launch moment. The event is the launch moment. Everything else is either feeding the event or it's noise.
That reframe changed the weekly calendar. When launch is the goal, you spend time on a landing page, on a press narrative, on a waitlist. When an event is the goal, you spend time on sponsors, venue, ambassadors, and the pieces of the product that have to hold up under real usage. The two workstreams look similar from the outside, because both involve pitching and both involve operations. They produce different outcomes. Landing pages produce waitlists that melt. Events produce users who lived the product and remember it in their body.
I walked him through the pitch deck on the call. He was direct about where it was failing. Too text-heavy. The team slide doesn't have photos. The diagrams are generic. The headline claim is something an investor has heard a hundred times this month. I was trying to deck my way into the conversation and he called it out. The fix isn't a better deck. The fix is running the event and having an unignorable story to tell afterwards. You can't deck your way into traction.
The Oxford hackathon came up as part of this. I'd been framing Oxford as a nice collaboration. Xisen pushed on whether I was treating it as distribution or as courtesy. Distribution means we use Oxford as a proving ground for the exact event-layer features we need working by Hong Kong, and we treat the Oxford attendees as a real audience that will tell other builders about the July event. Courtesy means we show up, we run a nice weekend, and we go home. Same weekend, two very different outcomes. I was defaulting to courtesy. The move is to treat Oxford as distribution.
The sponsor thread is the other place where the reframe matters. I'd been chasing a few specific sponsors with multiple rounds of follow-up and getting polite silence. The question on the call was whether I'm asking them the right question. A sponsor deciding whether to back a small event makes one decision. A sponsor deciding whether to back the biggest event of the region on a specific date has a completely different answer. Once the July event is the centerpiece of the pitch, the sponsor conversation is different in kind. I'd been effectively pitching them on a series of small wins when the actual pitch is one big wager on one weekend that will be hard to ignore.
The ambassador network conversation fell out of the same reframe. Ambassadors are distribution for builders, and they convert when there's a specific event for them to promote. Sending them generic MentorMates updates is courtesy work. Sending them the July event with a specific pitch about why their community should come is distribution work. I've been doing too much of the former and not enough of the latter.
Xisen's side of the call had the same shape from the Pulse angle. He's moving harder into agent-to-agent memory and access management, which is a harder technical thesis and a harder thing to explain. His pitch stops being a productivity story and becomes an infrastructure story. Mine stops being a platform story and becomes an event-operating-system story. Both pitches are narrower. Both are more defensible. And both get their real proof in July at the Hong Kong event, because a real agent-networking moment needs real agents and real users in real context.
The line I want to hold myself to for the rest of March: the deck doesn't get another polish pass until the event is running. Every hour I spend rewriting slides is an hour I'm not spending on sponsors, venue, or ambassadors. The pitch gets better when the event becomes real, not when the deck becomes pretty.
The check I'm making on myself: by the next mastermind, at least one new confirmed sponsor, the venue lock, and the Oxford hackathon frame changed from courtesy to distribution. If I'm still polishing the deck by then, the deck has become procrastination.