TECHIRELANDNATIONAL

CHALLENGE2026

Akella inMotion

Blueprint

Part 03 of fourThe room.

You have spent eighteen days building. The Challenge is decided by a few minutes of you talking, in a room of strangers, most of whom will never open the thing you made.

Problem. Solution. One use case. The demo. Scaling. Then the sentence you want repeated.

Set your pitch length See the five beats Rehearse against a clock

14 Sep: hub pitch day
13 Sep: slides due, 2pm
16 Sep: top teams named
24 Sep: Galway showcase

Dates from the published 2026 Challenge schedule, checked 9 September. Pitch length is not published, so this page is built to reflow around whichever clock your hub gives you.

The correction

The Challenge is not judged on your product. It is judged on the presentation of an idea.

This is the thing most teams get wrong, and it is worth being blunt about. The product may well be the end goal. It is not the entry. Judges see minutes of you, not weeks of you.

What you are doing

Building a product.

Reasonable, and it is what the eighteen days are for. But the build is the evidence, not the entry. Nobody is going to read your repository.

What is scored

A presentation of an idea.

Minutes, in front of strangers, most of whom will never touch the thing you made. Every hour of the build is spent so that those minutes can be true.

What survives

One sentence, repeated.

After a day of pitches, judges argue in shorthand. Your work gets compressed by a stranger into one clause. You either wrote that clause or you let them invent it.

10 of 442025 teams wrote that success would be “a working prototype”.

None of those ten reached the winners’ list. The lesson is not that you need metrics. It is that a definition of done has to be either a number or a moment, and both of those are things you say in a room. “A working prototype” is neither, and it is what a team writes down when it has not decided yet.

What that means for the last week

A feature nobody sees in the pitch is a feature that did not happen.
An hour of rehearsal is worth more than an hour of building, from the freeze onward.
The demo is the product, as far as the room is concerned. Build the ninety seconds.
If you cannot say it, it does not count. Say every number out loud before you believe it.

Set the clock

Same six beats. Different amount of room to say them.

Pick the slot your hub gave you. The beats, the word budgets, the deck, the rehearsal clock and the downloadable files all reflow around it. If you do not know yet, take three minutes and build up from there.

Ask your hub for the clock. TechIreland has published the slides deadline and the hub day, not a pitch length, and mentees are being told different numbers by different hubs. Write the three minute version regardless. It is the core of every length above, and the one that gets cut down to when a morning runs late.

What five minutes buys you

One diagram of how it works, and a real scaling beat instead of a sentence.

How teams waste it

A second feature. The room does not need two demos, it needs one it believes.

The pitch workspace

Build it, show it, then survive the questions.

Twelve panels, in the order the work happens. Copy the URL when a teammate or a mentor needs to be looking at exactly the same thing you are.

Five minutes slot

Five minutes · 01 of 12

The five beats

The shape of the pitch

The five beats

Problem, solution, one use case, the demo, scaling. Then land it.

Click a beat. Widths are drawn in proportion, so you can see that the demo is worth more than everything before it combined. Every beat carries what it is, what it is not, and the first thing to cut when the clock runs short.

The problem

43s of five minutes

Open on a named person on a specific day and what the current process costs them. No greeting, no team, no agenda. The room decides in the first fifteen seconds whether to listen, and you do not get that decision back.

Something a team could actually say

“Every Monday, Aoife in a Galway claims office opens forty PDFs, and four hours later one in ten has been routed to the wrong desk.”

What this beat is not

Not a market. Not a trend. Not a statistic about how AI is changing everything, which every other team in the room is also opening with.

What eats this beat

Starting with who you are. Nobody has ever won on the strength of a team slide at the front. Put the team at the end or leave it on the deck and never say it out loud.

Cut this first

The industry context sentence. Go straight to the person.

1 of 12

The room card

Sixteen lines. Print this one and put it in a pocket.

01Confirm your slot length with your hub before you write a word.
02Write the three minute version first. Every longer version is that one, earned.
03Comfortable delivery is 120 to 150 words a minute. Nerves push you past 180.
04Write the script, count the words, then cut. Never accelerate.
05Open on a named person on a specific day. Never on yourselves.
06One sentence for the solution. If it needs two, you have not chosen yet.
07One use case, walked end to end. Not three.
08The demo is the biggest beat. Cut around it until it is the only thing left.
09Start mid-flow. Narrate before you click. Say the outcome out loud.
10Seed the data. Never show a judge an empty product.
11Every number gets a denominator and a source, said out loud.
12Name your own weakness before a judge does, then ask what they would do.
13Answer in the first sentence, support in two more, stop at thirty seconds.
14"I do not know, and here is how we would find out" beats any bluff.
15Rehearse five times out loud, once with the wifi off, once to a stranger.
16Land the sentence you want repeated in the room next door. Then stop.

Next in the series

04. After.

Seven percent of hackathon projects are still alive at six months. What predicts survival, what to decide before you leave the venue, and the routes out of the Challenge that people actually take.

Back to The build