Over the weekend my team and I attended SquadCo Hackathon 3.0, it’s my first and the craziest hackathon I’ve attended . Yeah it’s my first and the craziest ,you heard that right😅.
The format was a full SWE interview-style mixed with a pitchathon, but we didn’t make it to the final ten to pitch , but it was worth the experience fior a first timer.

Round 1 was AI/ML drill ,we ranked 132th .We had to lock in ,change strategies .

Round 2 was a full SWE interview covering frontend ,backend ,Devops and produt management ,We cooked 😅, climbing to 75th .

At that point, only the top 50 teams were guaranteed a shot at pitching. We knew we were in based on mindset , but not comfortable. We knew we had to give it all .

Round 3 was the best and the hardest ,a 60 minutes LeetCode-style test (1 medium + 1 hard). We solved the hard (partitions) in about 50 minutes . We had 10minutes left to finish up ,fortunately we solved the second problem in 8 minutes,it was wild 😯.We moved to 35th of top 50 , qualified for the pitch .

Things stopped there , due to techinical issues of network , we couldn’t provide a flle nccessary for submission within the time interval , that was the end .
I was quite emtional but at the same time excited about the experience.

What we built : Synk , a peer-to-peer gig marketplace designed for Nigeria's informal economy. A platform where clients post service jobs and nearby providers discover and apply for them. It is built around trust and payment safety for people transacting with strangers.

How it works :

• Clients posts a job with location(1km radius by default) , budget(negotiable between the client and the service provider) and a AI generated description . -Service providers sees job posts on Google Maps feeds or browse list.
• Application - clients review their trust-score and credibility . - Squad API creates a per-job virtual account(escrow) .
• Payment : Service provider get notified , automatically gets contact info. on the dashboard incase of flag issues or fraud.
  • Clients marks complete: Squad Transfer API releases funds to service provider. - Rating : Both users rate each other.

We keep learning , we keep building.