What's your product and who is your target user? Where do they spend their time? LinkedIn, Reddit, and HN won't help if you're trying to reach, for example, teenage girls.
TL:DR;
- get a splash page up and start collecting emails
- guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read
- organize an event
- play around with paid marketing
Avi Flombaum gave an excellent talk on this a few months ago.
He dove into the six different types of technical interviews (cultural fit, brain teasers, whiteboard coding, cs trivia, code questions, and pairing) and how to prepare for each of them.
That's a fair point. I left it out of the blog post b/c it's a more complex issue that probably merits its own post.
It seems there's only 2 ways to go when hosting an event -- open the floodgates or actively manage the attendee list. Because of space constraints, we had to go with the latter.
Managing attendees isn't just about restricting male signups, as you say -- it's also about making sure there are enough designers to developers, beginners to experienced coders, and yes, men to women.
sure, having four devs organize this event would have been nice for credibility, but they wouldn't have necessarily throw a better hackathon just by being devs.
there's a learning curve to throwing good hackathons, just like with anything else. we talked to a ton of people before this event, including devs and other hackathon organizers, read every best practice we could find, and solicited a lot feedback from our attendees. sure, we made some mistakes (demos need to be queued up a la TC, peoples choice award needs to be fail-safe), but we'll fix them moving forward.
That's not entirely accurate. We needed to control the number of attendees to accomodate the venue's space constraints. We set aside 100 tickets, 50 male and 50 female. The male tickets sold out first, then the women's. We then opened up the waitlist in batches as people changed their RSVPs.
Eventbrite made this pretty confusing, as you can't waitlist more than 1 type of ticket (e.g. we couldn't waitlist male and female tickets). We'll come up with a better system for the next one.
That's an interesting point, and one I hadn't thought of. I'd argue that it probably depends on the nature of the event and what you're looking to get out of it. (e.g. if you're coming to a hackathon without a team, it's probably in your best interest to make your name public).
We'll definitely consider an opt-in box for the next go-around.
I collected some thoughts on this that you might find helpful: http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/
TL:DR; - get a splash page up and start collecting emails - guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read - organize an event - play around with paid marketing