build it like a hackathon or bilah method


BILAH or Build It Like A Hackathon is the simple concept of building businesses fast. The idea is to decrease the time it takes to go to market and advertise your brand.

With BILAH, we build a business and all of its elements like we were building at a hackathon where time and resources are limited.

Why you should use BILAH or Build It Like A Hackathon.

BILAH can help you launch faster and reach audiences. Before you read further, here's a small disclaimer: some businesses require time before they are fit to enter a market: if your business is somewhere along the same lines then maybe this does not work well for you.

Nonetheless, there are still aspects to building a page that you can expedite that can lead to a faster launch, be it online or at an event.

The advantages of BILAH

  1. You set a limited time and agree to use the least resources; therefore you are forced to think inside the box and launch instead of going left field for a miraculous moment.
  2. Since you are limited in what you do, you are forced to do something that just gets the job done instead of mooching about and having doubts.
  3. You are able to trim the unnecessary fat in your business proposition like a minimalist generalist.

The disadvantages of BILAH

  1. Building it like a hackathon does not work for brands that really need creative inputs or massive corporate approvals.
  2. This strategy can be seen haphazard at work and is recommended only for those who want to build their own business.
  3. After launch, you will most likely want to rebrand and change a lot of things to appeal to your audience better; this might be time consuming, costly or exhausting.

Who is BILAH for and how to get started?

who is bilah for

If you are still enticed by the idea of BILAH and want to get started, I have listed down who it is meant for and what's the best way to get started.

BILAH is for freelancers, agencies and indie hackers

Let's say you are a to-be social media marketing agency owner and you want to lay down the foundation for your business.

Here are all the steps you might take:

  1. Contemplate starting the agency.
  2. Start off as a registered business and getting all necessary trademarks.
  3. Set up systems for invoicing, assets, payroll, etc.
  4. Spend a massive amount of time with designing the visuals of your business.
  5. Sharing work progress so far to see what people think.

And each individual step can take 1-7 days depending on how keen you are to get it right.

You want to appear flawless and pristine but this leads to delays and maybe not launching at all.

Overthinking and worrying about these aspects will lead to delays in launch and marketing.

Here's everyone that can benefit from BILAH:

  1. Freelancers looking to get into the market.
  2. Photographers, barbers aka service providers who want to offer a service or package.
  3. Agency owners who are stuck on visuals and perception rather than actually getting out there and telling people that you exist.
  4. Indie hackers who are on mission to launch new products or SaaS.

Getting started with BILAH and the things to keep in mind

If I am building a new business, here's all the steps I take:

  1. Firstly, I set up a timeline on how long I will take to setup my business. Usually this is 1 day, less if I want a challenge.
  2. Then, I make a list of people I know personally that will be interested in my services. I reach out to them to get an opinion or see if they want to be early customers.
  3. Only when there's validation do I start to actually build.
  4. I will use tools like Coolors, Fontjoy, etc to decide my visuals - all within 30 minutes.
  5. Wherever possible I will make sure I need to not register as a business and get the amount wired directly to my bank account.
  6. Then I will create templates for promotions, as well as brand copy + tone.

With these, I am good to go. Not everyone agrees with the approach or likes it but BILAH means that I can get to deep work without the need for thoughts clouding my judgment.

Within a day or two I can prepare my business strategy, launch and reach users early to see what works; this even works for services you may have no clue about - as long as you can hire the right people to solve the problems.

My lessons around building a business like a hackathon:

  1. You don't need for your business to be registered to start promoting it.
  2. When in doubt, use Inter as your font and a palette for your visuals.
  3. If it's a SaaS, you can build mockups using Figma or Framer and share a video or demo; it's always like that a person will get better context once they can see what they get.
  4. You can leverage various tools across the internet to work in your favour; don't wait to afford an expensive paid one to start doing business.

If you would want to improve your productivity like me, a minimalist, then feel free to subscribe to my newsletter and see my recent posts on X.

Wishing you all the best with your business!