Inside Headout’s Hackin' 2026
For 42 hours, titles and functions disappeared and nearly one-third of Headout became builders. Inside Hackin’ at Headout, where ideas became working products, teams moved fast and everyone got a taste of founder mode.
For 42 hours, Headout stopped feeling like a company with neatly defined functions, job descriptions and reporting lines. It felt like a collection of founders.
Engineers built alongside marketers. Designers teamed up with operators. People who had never written a line of code went from an idea in their heads to a working product in less than two days. Former Headouters came back to join the chaos. Mentors moved from room to room, helping teams sharpen their thinking. Somewhere between the music, the midnight meals and the unreasonable number of AI tokens consumed, ideas began turning into things people could actually use.
This was Hackin’ at Headout, our internal AI hackathon. And nearly one-third of Headout’s global team participated. That number matters, but not simply because it made Hackin’ one of our largest internal building events. It matters because it reflects something we have always believed: building should not belong to one function.
At Headout, everyone is a builder.
Giving everyone the ability to build
For a long time, turning an idea into a product required access to a very particular set of skills. You needed to know how to code, understand infrastructure and convince someone with technical bandwidth to help bring it to life. AI is changing that equation.
The distance between imagining something and making it real has collapsed. A marketer who understands a recurring customer problem can now prototype a solution. An operator who has spent years navigating an inefficient workflow can attempt to rebuild it. A designer can move beyond a static mock-up and create something people can interact with. But this only happens when people are given permission, tools and room to experiment.
For Hackin’, teams had open access to the AI models and tokens they needed, along with tools from our partners Replit and fal. No rationing curiosity. No spending half the hackathon seeking approvals. Just an open tap and a simple instruction: use whatever helps you build. Tokenmaxxing, as they say.
Over 60% of the participants came from non-technical functions. Many arrived without knowing exactly how they would turn their idea into something functional. By the end of the 42 hours, they were demoing products they had built themselves. That may have been the most important outcome of Hackin’. Not any one project, but the realisation across the company that the ability to build is becoming dramatically more widely distributed.
Forty-two hours in founder mode
Hackin’ was designed as more than a sprint to create clever prototypes. We wanted every participant to experience what it feels like to operate as a founder. That meant beginning with a problem, not a technology. Speaking to users. Questioning whether the problem was meaningful enough to solve. Building the smallest useful version. Deciding how it would be distributed. Convincing others that it deserved to exist. And doing all of it with limited time and incomplete information. Because a good product without distribution is still only half a product.
We ran a practical session on the AI tools, models and workflows teams could use to move from an idea to a working prototype quickly, whether they were technical or building with AI for the first time. We also covered how to turn a hack into a product people care about, from positioning and launch messaging to demos, trailers and the small details that make an idea land. Domain experts from across Headout joined teams as mentors, helping them think through the problem, pressure-test their assumptions and identify the fastest path to something useful.
The teams were not simply asked, “What can you build with AI?” They were asked: Who is this for? What painful problem are you solving? Why does AI make this possible now? How will the first hundred people discover it? What would it take to put this in front of a real user next week?
The result was a different kind of energy. Teams were not waiting for perfect briefs or complete certainty. They were making decisions, changing direction, shipping rough versions and learning through momentum.
The office stayed alive through the night. There was a DJ, a near-continuous supply of food and the particular intensity that emerges when a group of people briefly becomes obsessed with making something work.
The hackathon had its own product
Before the building began, we also built a product to help organise the builders.
The Hackin’ Bot became the operating layer for the hackathon. Participants could use it to discover ideas, find teammates and refine their pitches. Had an idea but needed an engineer? The bot could help you find one. Wanted to participate but did not yet have an idea? You could browse the idea repository and join a team that matched your interests. Had the beginnings of a concept but could not articulate the problem or pitch clearly? The bot helped teams sharpen it.
It solved one of the hardest parts of any hackathon: getting the right people around the right problem before the clock starts. The experience also reinforced a broader belief we have about AI. Some of its most valuable applications will not always be sweeping, standalone products. They will be systems that remove friction from coordination, help people make better decisions and enable action that previously required far more time or effort.
Once a Headouter, always a Headouter
Some of the people who joined Hackin’ no longer work at Headout. Former Headouters returned to participate, mentor teams and build alongside old colleagues. It made the event feel larger than an internal company initiative. It felt like a community of people connected by a shared appetite for creating things.
“Once a Headouter, always a Headouter” is easy to say. It means more when people choose to come back for a 42-hour lock-in.
From demos to the real world
Most hackathons end with a presentation. The projects are applauded, prizes are handed out and the prototypes quietly disappear into forgotten folders.
We wanted Hackin’ to end differently. Teams were encouraged to think beyond the demo from the beginning. Could this become a real internal tool? Could it improve the Headout experience for guests? Could it help our supply partners? Could it remove hours of repetitive work? Could it become a feature used across the company?
At the end of 42 hours, five teams emerged as winners, each tackling a different part of the Headout experience.
Relic Quest, built by Mukul, Suhas and Aromal, won Five Stars, awarded to the hack guests would rave about. It turns guided tours into immersive treasure hunts, inviting guests to spot clues, answer questions and collect virtual relics as they move through an experience. Read more here.
Dex WalkieTalkie, built by Neil, Anurag and Ajith, took home Partner Pass for making life easier for our partners. It allows guides and venue staff to create tours simply by walking through a place, taking photographs and recording voice notes along the way. Read more here.
Clockwork, built by Madhav, Himanshu and Shriyan, won Move the Needle for solving a strategic blocker. It intelligently checks and syncs inventory to reduce the chances of a slot disappearing after a guest has already tried to book it. The result is a smoother checkout experience, fewer booking failures and a more reliable marketplace. Read more here.
Automated Dex Onboarding, built by Prasenjit and Manas, won Mission Control for helping Headout run better from the inside. It uses robotics-inspired mapping technology to turn raw footage from real-world venues into accurate spatial maps, reducing the manual effort involved in onboarding a new place to Dex while improving the speed and accuracy of production. Read more here.
Moonshot, built by Arvind, Aman and Anish, took home Root Access, awarded to the deepest technical hack in the stack. The system automatically generates short-form videos tailored to each guest and their booking, offering a glimpse of what post-booking communication could look like when it becomes more personal, visual and scalable. Read more here.
These projects are evidence of what becomes possible when people are trusted to move quickly, given access to powerful tools and pushed to think like owners.
The tools will keep changing. The models will become more powerful. What will continue to matter is the culture of building around them: curiosity, urgency, ownership and the confidence to make something that did not exist yesterday.
That is the kind of culture we are building at Headout. And we are looking for more builders to join us.
