How I won a hackathon at 14

I walked into my first hackathon at 14 as a total beginner. No team of pros, no clever plan, no clue what I was really doing. I just wanted to build something that worked.

The idea was simple and a little stubborn: turn your inbox into voice notes and let you answer out loud. I wired it together as an n8n workflow, the Email checker. It read your new mail to you and let you reply by talking back.

By the end of the week it had a paying customer, and the whole thing won at STARTPLATZ in Cologne. That was the exact moment tech grabbed me and never let go.

The lesson I keep coming back to: building the thing is the easy part. Finishing it, shipping it, putting it in front of a real person who pays for it, that is the fight worth having. I have been chasing it ever since.