What Is Stage 0?

Stage 0 is a full-day, validation-only hackathon where, instead of building, participants identify problems and conduct validation research to make the most credible case possible to the judges that they have identified a real problem that is significant to the people who experience it and has a venture-scale market.

What Is Stage 0?

Definition · Stage 0

A full-day competition in which teams are judged entirely on the quality of the problems they identify and the validation evidence they gather — not on anything they build.

Stage 0 currently runs quarterly in Manila, Philippines.

Why Host a Hackathon Where No One Builds Anything?

Recent startup post-mortems conducted by CB Insights continue to show that poor product-market fit is a recurring underlying cause of failure. Stage 0 is designed to help participants challenge problem and market assumptions before they begin building.

We have found that:

• +The problem founders often face isn't building; it's building the right thing to solve the right problem, for the right people.
• +It is common for founders to build before they have enough evidence to justify building.
• +Founders often build based on unvalidated ideas, then anchor to those ideas.
• +While problem validation is one of the most important things early-stage founders should do, it is also one of the most commonly overlooked and poorly executed.
• +Traditional startup programs and hackathons encourage founders to build, but not to ask if what they are building should be built.
• +Pitch competitions reward founders for being polished and good at presentations, not for determining whether they have an actual venture-scale problem that's painful or not.

We believe many of the most important aspects of building a startup aren't visible, exciting, or sexy. This causes founders to prioritize the more visible work like building. This also results in program providers prioritizing the more visible activities such as demo days and pitch competitions. You are then left with founders who, in some cases, have spent years attempting to build startups without ever developing the core founder capabilities needed in areas such as problem validation, user research, and making continue-or-kill decisions. However, these founders have spent years cycling through numerous accelerators, incubators, hackathons, and pitch competitions.

We want to help founders begin developing the core capabilities necessary for success. We want founders to learn how to conduct rigorous problem validation to determine whether they've identified a problem worth building a solution for before they build anything. We want to push founders to embrace the non-sexy, often boring parts of building an early-stage startup that will play a significant role in whether it succeeds or fails.

How Does Stage 0 Work?

Over the course of 12 hours, participants get to know each other, form teams, work with their teams to identify problems, and conduct validation research. The competition portion of the hackathon itself is broken into two rounds.

Round 1 presentations are judged on the clarity and coherence of the problem, the quality of the initial evidence used to justify moving the problem to validation instead of killing it, the rationale used to determine what would have caused them to kill the problem, and their ability to identify the remaining uncertainty and riskiest assumptions with their problems.

Round 2 ends with the six remaining teams presenting their validation work to the judges, who assess the strength and quality of their evidence, their ability to explicitly identify the assumptions that needed to be validated, and their ability to update their beliefs as they conducted validation.

Stage 0 Prizes

Past Stage 0 Winners

April 2026 — Stage 0 Competition

• +First place: Ma. Christina Manalo, Jomari Angel Jacinto
• +Second place: Christine Joy Nañola
• +Third place: Raphael Paulo Alon, Lawrence Panes

July 2026 — Stage 0 Competition

• +First place — Agartha: Jihad Fariq Tejam, Emiel Benedict Jane, Dianne Boholst
• +Second place — GWP: John Andrei Nañola, Justin Loui Sy, Erielle Flores, Grace Kato
• +Third place — CacheMe: Franchezca Banayad, Princess Mae Sanchez, Mariano Luiz King, Racehl Gio Acupan

Past Stage 0 Datapoints