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6 free workshops · hackathon Oct 16–18, 2026 · workuity biltmore, phx

Zero to Launch — the Ship AI hackathon

Ten weeks of go-to-market, then a weekend where you don't build — you launch. Six free workshops at Workuity Biltmore (our venue sponsor) on alternating Wednesdays from August 5, a build window that opens Aug 3, and a hackathon in October where it all goes public. Bring the product you've been sitting on. Judged on what shipped, not on what you demoed.

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October 16–18, 2026 · Workuity Biltmore, Phoenix, AZ · Arizona time

Workshops

6 sessions, Aug 5 – Oct 14, 2026

Hackathon

October 16–18, 2026

Where

Workuity Biltmore — Phoenix, AZ

Cost

Free · teams of 1–4

Why this exists

Two kinds of builder, stuck in the same place.

The perpetual builder

  • Shipping code every day, launched nothing.
  • Not sure the product is right, so the answer is another feature.
  • The product bloats, the date slides, and there's still no customer on the other end.

The ready-but-frozen builder

  • The product works. The next move doesn't exist.
  • No site, no audience, no channel, no first ten customers.
  • No idea which of those to do first.

This weekend is for both. Most hackathons reward building something new in 48 hours, and it dies on Monday. Here the code is the part you already have. What's missing is the launch — that's the whole deliverable.

feel the fear and do it anyways

What you leave with

Six things, by Sunday afternoon.

The first two are written in August and everything after is built on them. The last four are what the judges score at the weekend.

Positioning that holds up

A one-page brief: who it's for, what they use today instead, your sharp edge, the outcome in their words. Swap-tested before anything gets built on it.

An elevator pitch you've delivered

Sixty seconds, five beats, a real ask. One version for customers, one for investors. Said out loud, on the clock, on demo day.

A live marketing site

Real URL, real copy, content and SEO in place. Not a placeholder with a waitlist form.

A public launch

Executed during the weekend. A date, a channel, an audience. If nobody outside the room can reach it, it didn't launch.

A growth engine

One repeatable channel with numbers attached. Not a plan for one — a running one.

Receipts

Analytics, signups, revenue, replies. Flat is a valid result if you can show what you learned.

The room

Registered builders

2

Participants

2

Teams

Adarsh Saripalli

The program

Six Wednesdays, then the weekend.

A full GTM engineering framework — the deck is session one, and each session builds on the last: positioning before the site, the site before the channel, the channel before the launch. Every night is a presentation with a live build — watch, or follow along on your own laptop. Free, public, open to anyone.

VisionAug 5 – Sep 2

The roadmap, then what it looks like when it works — two businesses, real numbers, B2C and B2B.

CraftSep 16 – Oct 7

Positioning that holds up, and the site that carries it.

LaunchOct 14 – Oct 18

Automated distribution, paid, and the CAC ceiling — then the weekend where it all goes public.

  1. 01Wed Aug 5GTM Engineering
  2. 02Wed Aug 19Zero to $3,000
  3. 03Wed Sep 2Outbound Agents
  4. 04Wed Sep 16Unfair Advantage
  5. 05Wed Oct 7Ship the Surface
  6. 06Wed Oct 14Agentic Growth

Each session has its own page: the agenda, what to bring, what to go do afterward. See the whole curriculum.

The weekend

Friday night to Sunday afternoon.

No teaching this weekend — that happened on Wednesdays. Friday you lock a launch plan, Saturday you execute it in a room full of people doing the same thing, Sunday you show what it produced. The B2C and B2B playbooks were sessions two and three; mentors run those 1:1 on Saturday.

FridayOct 16

Kickoff & launch plans

  1. 6:00 PM

    Doors, food, check-in

  2. 6:30 PM

    Kickoff — ten weeks, two days left

    The framework condensed for anyone joining fresh, plus the rules, the categories and the deadline.

    gtm.desic.xyz

  3. 7:00 PM

    Launch rehearsal

    Pre-flight as a room: site live, analytics firing, tracking that survives a judge's question, assets exported, copy written. Then we break every plan on purpose — better Friday than Sunday.

  4. 7:45 PM

    60-second pitches

    Everyone delivers the pitch they wrote in September. Newcomers get the crash version and pitch anyway. Dry run for Sunday.

  5. 8:15 PM

    Team formation

    Solo is fine. Teams up to four. Been building alone since August? This is where you pick up help.

  6. 8:45 PM

    Launch plans locked

    Every team writes it down: what goes live, on what channel, to which audience, at what hour. Posted in Discord so the room can hold you to it.

  7. 9:15 PM

    Building starts

SaturdayOct 17

Launch day

  1. 9:00 AM

    Doors, coffee

  2. 9:30 AM

    Launch clinic

    The last mile: site live, analytics wired, tracking that survives Sunday's questions, launch post written. Forty-five minutes, then you go do it.

  3. 10:15 AM

    Build & mentor hours

    1:1 rotations running all day. Sites, performance, paid acquisition, B2B sales, content, design.

  4. 12:00 PM

    Lunch

  5. 1:00 PM

    Launches go live

    Teams push publicly, with the room as a war room. Copy review, channel help, and the first numbers while there's still time to react.

  6. 3:00 PM →

    Iterate on what the channel tells you

    The launch is data. Saturday evening is for acting on it rather than admiring it.

SundayOct 18

Ship & pitch

  1. 9:00 AM

    Doors, final build block

  2. 12:00 PM

    Submissions close

    Hard deadline. Lunch while the judges read.

  3. 1:00 PM

    Pitches

    Five minutes plus three of questions, live product on screen.

  4. 3:30 PM

    Judging

  5. 4:00 PM

    Awards & closing

Prizes & judging

Five categories. One judged award per team.

The pool is cash plus in-kind and grows with sponsorship — amounts land on this page as sponsors confirm. Entry is free either way.

Best B2C Launch

Real users, real traction, from a launch executed during the weekend.

Best B2B Launch

Real pipeline or paying customers. Design partners and pilots count.

Best Marketing Site

Craft and conversion. Positioning, clarity, performance, content.

Best Growth Engine

The most repeatable channel, with the numbers to prove it repeats.

Crowd Favoriteroom-voted

Voted by the room at Sunday's pitches, not scored by the judges — the build everyone wanted to try, argued about, or wished they'd thought of first. It's the one award you can take home alongside a judged category.

How it's scored

What you get for entering

Six things on the table.

Most hackathons pay out to the top three and everyone else goes home with a wristband. Here the floor is worth showing up for — the awards sit on top of it.

A certification, for everyone who enters

Submit a project and you get one, not just the winners. It names what you shipped and where you placed, at a public URL you can put on LinkedIn or send to a hiring manager. Turning up and shipping is the bar.

A permanent listing on this site

Every entrant gets a row: team, project, live URL, category and placement. It stays up long after the room empties.

The prize pool

Cash plus in-kind — API credits, hosting, tools — split across the five categories. It grows with sponsorship, and amounts land on this page as sponsors confirm. Entry is free either way.

A trophy, for the shelf

Every category winner takes home a physical award, engraved with the category and the year. Cash gets spent and credits get burned. This is the part still on your desk in five years.

An internship, as a prize

One award is a seat rather than a payout: a paid internship with a sponsor company. If you're early in your career, it's the fastest route from a weekend project to getting paid to build.

Visibility to investors

Sunday's pitches are open to the venture capitalists, angels and operators we bring in, and the judging panel comes from the same pool. Five minutes, live product, real numbers. No deck round — just the launch you executed.

The listing and the certifications live on the results page, published Sunday, straight after the awards.

The rules

Eleven of them. All of them short.

  1. 01Teams of 1–4. One team per person. Solo entries are fine.
  2. 02Bring a product you've already built, or start when the build window opens Monday August 3, 2026. Both are eligible — this is a launch hackathon, not a from-scratch hackathon.
  3. 03Anyone can compete. No workshop attendance required — turn up on the Friday with something to launch and you're in. The sessions make you better at it; they were never a gate.
  4. 04Your launch has to go public during the hackathon weekend, Oct 16–18, 2026. A live, publicly reachable URL is required.
  5. 05Submit your project by 12:00 PM MST, Sunday Oct 18. No late submissions.
  6. 06You keep 100% of your IP. Ship AI claims nothing. Open source is welcome, not required.
  7. 07Any stack, any tools, any language. AI-assisted everything is fine and expected.
  8. 08Receipts required. Numbers in your pitch need evidence you can put on screen.
  9. 09One judged category per team. Win one and you're out of the running for the others — Crowd Favorite is the exception, since the room votes it.
  10. 10Demos over memos. Five minutes, live product. Slides are supporting material, not the pitch.
  11. 11In person. No remote track this round.

Submissions close 12:00 PM MST, Sunday Oct 18.

One submission per team, filed from your Ship AI account: project, live URL, what you launched, the numbers. Draft it whenever, edit until the deadline. The full requirements are on the submission page — read them Friday, not Sunday morning.

Register for the hackathonWhat the form asks for

Backed by

Who's behind it.

Ship AI is free and stays free because of them — and most of them give more than money. The rooms we meet in, the food, the prize pool, platform credits, mentors in Saturday's rotations, judges on Sunday's panel, and introductions that outlast the weekend. All of it is priced in the open.

Platinum · Title

  • Workuity

Gold

Silver

  • CEI Gateway

We're also looking for

Judges, mentors and volunteers.

Judges

Sunday, roughly 1:00–4:30 PM · 3–5 seats

Founders and operators who have launched something and can tell a real number from a vanity one. Score against published criteria, ask hard questions in the Q&A, hand out an award.

The panel is small and picked by hand, so this is an application, not a sign-up. A seat also comes with Gold and Platinum sponsorship — see the menu.

Apply to judge

Mentors

Saturday afternoon · 5–8 seats

1:1 rotations with teams that need one thing unstuck: marketing sites and performance, paid acquisition, B2B sales, content and SEO, design. Two hours is enough — take the block you can make.

Offer to mentor

Volunteers

2 jobs · a few hours each

The weekend doesn't run without these. None of them need you to know anything about the products in the room.

  • Photography — a few hours, any day. Shoot the room, the teams and Sunday's pitches. The recap film and every announcement after this one run on those photos.
  • Check-in booth — 2–3 hours, friday or saturday. Work the door: badges, names, pointing people at food and power. Friday evening is the busy one.

Offer to volunteer

Questions

Frequently asked.

Do I need to already have a product to enter?

No, but it helps a lot. Most hackathons ban pre-existing projects — this one is built around them. If you're starting fresh, the build window opens Monday August 3, ten weeks before the weekend. Either way the score is weighted toward launching, not building.

What's the difference between the workshops and the hackathon?

The workshops are six free sessions on alternating Wednesdays from August 5 to October 14 — the whole go-to-market curriculum, in order, with the work done live on screen. Watch, or follow along on your laptop. The hackathon weekend, October 16 to 18, is the finale: you launch publicly, build the growth engine, and pitch what happened. You build across the ten weeks; you ship at the weekend.

Do I have to attend the workshops to compete?

No. Come to all six, one, or none. Turn up on the Friday with something to launch and you're in. The sessions are free and make the launch go better, but they were never a gate.

What's the GitHub repo for?

Optional, and genuinely useful. It's all open source: a folder per session and 31 skill files that do the mechanical half of the go-to-market work — positioning brief, pricing model, content map, launch checklist. Run the process yourself whenever you like. Nobody is disqualified for not having one.

What if I'm not clear on my value prop yet?

That's expected, and September 16 is the session for it. Positioning and the elevator pitch: who it's for, what they use today instead, your sharp edge, the outcome in their language, then a sixty-second pitch that ends in a real ask. Written live on screen for a real product, cuts included. It sits before the site session on purpose — a site built on fuzzy positioning is a nicely built page that says nothing.

How much does it cost?

Nothing. Every Ship AI event is free and public. Sponsors cover the prize pool and the food.

What do I get if I don't win?

A certification and a permanent listing on this site, same as everyone else who submits. The certification names your project and your placement at a public URL you can link from LinkedIn or a job application; the listing keeps your live URL up after the weekend. And your product is launched, in front of the judges, investors and operators in the room whether you place or not.

How does the internship prize work?

One award is a paid internship seat with a sponsor company rather than a cash prize, aimed at builders early in their career. The sponsor makes the final call on the offer, and the details go on this page once sponsorship closes October 2.

Will there be investors in the room?

That's the plan. Sunday's pitches are open to the venture capitalists, angels and operators we bring in, and the judging panel is drawn from the same pool. Nobody is raising on stage — you show the launch you executed and the numbers it produced, which beats a deck anyway.

Do I need a team?

No. Solo entries compete on the same footing. Friday night has a 60-second pitch round and a team formation block, so come alone and leave with a team if you want one.

Do I need to be a developer?

No. Half the weekend is positioning, copy, content, channels and sales — the parts engineering-heavy teams are worst at. Designers, marketers and non-technical founders are genuinely useful here.

What counts as launching?

A publicly reachable URL a stranger can use, plus an actual launch action — a post, a listing, an email, a thread, a call. Not a private beta, not a waitlist page you never told anyone about.

Who owns what I build?

You do, entirely. Ship AI takes no equity, no license and no IP. Open sourcing your work is welcome but not required.

Can I participate remotely?

Not this round. The mentor rotations and the pitch session only work in a room. The Discord stays open all weekend, but entries have to be in person.

What if I can't be there all three days?

Come for what you can. Friday's keynote and Sunday's pitches are the two that matter most — the deadline applies to everyone either way.

What should I bring?

Laptop, charger, whatever you've already built, and a domain you're willing to point at it. Everything else we'll have.

How do I sponsor, judge, mentor or volunteer?

Make an account and send the request from your dashboard — one short form each, straight to Santos rather than a Discord thread he might miss. Mentoring is Saturday's 1:1 rotations. Volunteering is photography or the check-in booth, a few hours. Judging is an application rather than a sign-up: the panel is small and picked by hand, and a seat also comes with Gold and Platinum sponsorship. Sponsorship closes October 2, 2026 so prize amounts can go on this page before registration opens.

Bring the thing you never launched.

Register for the hackathonJoin the Discord

just ship it