About ten years ago, I was deep in the Boston hackathon scene. Every few months, a group of my friends and I would get together for a caffeine-fueled sprint of hacking, pitching, and barely sleeping. It was intense, scrappy, and exhilarating. We’d roll in Friday night with some vague idea, spend the next 48 hours building a rough product and rehearsing a pitch, and by Sunday we’d be demoing to judges with bloodshot eyes and a working prototype. We won often, took home a good amount of prize money, and built a strong track record. But even when we didn’t win, the process was always worth it.
This weekend, I had a familiar itch — but a very different experience.
It started with a simple goal: catalog the books on my bookshelf. I uploaded a few photos into ChatGPT and asked it to extract the titles, authors, language (my shelf is multilingual), genre tags, and provide links to Goodreads for additional context. It parsed the images and returned structured data that was impressively accurate and detailed.
Then came the thought: What if this were a real app?
From Utility to Product
I asked ChatGPT to help me build a prototype. I told it I’d be using Vercel for hosting, Supabase for auth and storage, and Next.js with the App Router. It responded with a complete project scaffold: database schema, endpoint structure, key UI pages, and a list of libraries to install. I dropped that prompt into Cursor, and within minutes had a working foundation for the app.
It wasn’t just writing code — it was outlining the entire architecture.
That experience alone would’ve been impressive. But I didn’t stop there.
Naming, Branding, and Vision
Next, I asked ChatGPT for a punchy VC-style pitch. It returned one instantly:
“We’re building the first visual cataloging platform for readers, powered by computer vision and AI. This isn’t just a book tracker — it’s a personal knowledge graph, starting with your shelf.”
It went on to describe the value proposition, market size, and future potential features: semantic search, AI-powered shelf reordering, and social discovery. It was slick, clear, and more polished than half the decks I’ve seen in actual fundraising meetings.
From there, we brainstormed names. I wanted something with weight, history, and a nod to knowledge. We landed on Pergamon — a reference to the ancient library in Asia Minor, once home to over 200,000 scrolls. The name felt right. Timeless, evocative, and rooted in the idea of a personal archive.
The Client-Only Hackathon Demo
In a traditional hackathon, the first goal is always a working demo. You don’t need a live backend or production database — you just need something people can click through. So I asked ChatGPT to help me spin up a client-only demo, using static JSON data and a mocked UI. It generated a prompt for Cursor that I then used to built the whole thing out.
Within the same session, I had a UI walkthrough of the Pergamon app — styled, structured, and clickable.
At that point, I had:
- A working visual demo
- A clear product concept
- A brand name and pitch
That used to take two days. I was less than an hour in.
From Demo to Business Plan
I was curious how far I could push it. So I asked ChatGPT: What would it take to actually build this at scale?
It responded with a complete project plan: from technical implementation to team growth, auth layers, API integrations, quotas, and more. I asked for a go-to-market plan to get to 100 users. Then how to 10x that again over the next quarter. Then a 1-year roadmap assuming continuous growth.
It gave me:
- Marketing strategies
- KPI suggestions
- Community engagement tactics
- Revenue models
- Cost projections
- Even likely acquirers
Finally, I asked: When does this become profitable? And ChatGPT gave me a five-year outlook with exit options.
👉 Explore the Outputs:
Reflections on a Changing Creative Stack
There’s still a lot of work to do if I ever want to take Pergamon to market. But that’s not the point. The point is: in one fluid, creative session, I moved from a casual idea to a product vision, demo, and business plan — all without spinning up a team, a Figma file, or a whiteboard.
This isn’t a shortcut. It’s a shift.
The old hackathon model was about what you could build under pressure. The new model is about what you can imagine and shape with leverage.
The expectations for what you can produce in a weekend are now wildly different. A few years ago, a working prototype and some napkin math was impressive. Today, you can build a demo, pitch it, and map out its first five years — all in a single creative burst.