The submission itself

• Project description and team details.
• Presentation video, 2 to 3 minutes. This one explains the why: who you are, what it does, why you started, the market, how you get customers, and a working demo.
• Product demo video, max 3 minutes. This one explains the how. Keep it technical. It is not a second pitch, and turning it into one wastes the only slot where a judge watches the thing actually run.
• GitHub repository with the hackathon code.
• Go-to-market notes, logo, and team location. Set the location to Türkiye.

There is also a weekly one-minute update video Colosseum asks for. It is optional on paper and most teams skip it, which is exactly why it works: it is the cheapest evidence of momentum you can produce, and they watch them.

Superteam Balkan went through all 139 winning submissions from the past three hackathons and counted what each team actually uploaded. Around 88% were a recorded video rather than a static deck: 63 Loom, 49 YouTube, 8 Vimeo, against roughly 16 PDFs. The Grand Champion submitted a YouTube video.

Colosseum's own line is that the pitch video is usually the first item judges review and can decide whether a project is shortlisted at all. Standard startup advice says the opposite and warns founders off video, but that advice is written for a live demo day with five hundred people in the room. This is one reviewer working alone through a hundred submissions. In that setting the video does the job the deck would.

• Superteam Balkan's write-up of the count↗
• Their full hackathon guide↗

A good one-liner gets you shortlisted on its own. It is what a judge remembers an hour later, and what an investor repeats to their partners when you are not in the room. "Stablecoin neobank for SMBs" survives being repeated by someone who does not care about your product. Most one-liners do not.

1. 01Write the takeaway in the title. Never put "Problem" at the top of a slide. Put "Users lose $4M a year to wallet drains."
2. 02One point per slide.
3. 03Under 40 words. Past that, reviewers skim.
4. 04Cut the superlatives. Every founder writes revolutionary and fastest. Replace them with proof: start to finish in 15 seconds, $400 saved per user per month.
5. 05Every slide readable in 15 seconds. Assume 90 seconds for the whole deck.

• Overselling the future. A grand vision with no track record reads as a pitch, not a product. Show the MVP.
• Forced crypto integration. If the product could exist without a chain, your use of one has to be justified deeply, or not claimed at all.
• A weak demo. A repository link isn't a demo. There must be something a judge can watch working.
• Missing permissions. Private repos and locked Google Docs that judges can't open. This is the single most common fatal mistake. If your repo stays private, grant access to hackathon@colosseum.com, then have someone outside your team confirm they can actually open every link you submitted.

These are not style points. Both have removed teams from competitions that had already done the work.

1. 01One product per team, and one per person. You cannot submit two projects, and you cannot appear on two submissions.
2. 02You may start before the window opens and reuse your own code, but only work done inside the window is judged, and you have to disclose all prior development on the submission form.

Building on other people's open source is fine and actively encouraged. The pre-existing code rule is about your own earlier work, not about the libraries and protocols you compose with.

Submit two days early. Every hackathon has a slow final night, and there's no appeal for a deadline missed by ten minutes.