What I got wrong in Comp 6, and what I think actually wins

Hey Everyone.

Quick one for anyone who's shipped a comp or two and wants to push up a level. I won Comp 6 (Mayston, a stroke rehab researcher) and a few people asked what actually went into it. I saw a community post by

@Ariel Ortiz

with 20 votes on a poll for people asking thoughts. So here's a quick summary of what I'd tell past-me, starting with the thing I got most wrong this time round

**The mistake**

I spent the first three or four hours of Comp 6 designing a product for a problem that didn't exist, for users who didn't exist. Lovely idea, real momentum, completely made up. Then I got on the phone with my dad (he's been a physio 30+ years) and within ten minutes it was obvious those people weren't real and neither was the friction. I binned it and started from scratch.

The lesson isn't just "talk to an expert," though do that. It's that I started building before I'd asked the questions that decide whether there's anything there at all.

**Ask the questions first**

Before any design, before any code, the actual work is answering these honestly:

- Do I understand this user domain?

- Do I understand their real frictions, not the ones I'm imagining?

- Do I understand who the audience is?

If you can't answer those, you don't have a problem yet, you have a guess. Everything I built after I could answer them was real. Everything before was the three hours I threw away.

**What I think actually wins**

Here's the rough model I've landed on. It's a multiplication, not a checklist:

**strong submission ≈ depth of build × visibility × founder credibility**

A zero on any one term zeroes the whole thing. The deepest build nobody can see still scores nothing.

**Depth** is a genuinely hard, nuanced technical problem that solves a real friction for real people, without just swapping their old friction for a new one. The questions above are what protect it. No real users, no real depth, just complexity dressed up.

**Visibility** is making that depth seen, by two audiences. The engineer who wants the architecture made legible, and the user who needs the domain story: who they are, what hurts, why your thing fixes it. The judge reads as both. For Mayston I put the depth in a README with diagrams, written so the user's problem is obvious, and I told the domain story as a video: who physios in the UK actually are, what they deal with, what the educators deal with, then why and how Mayston fits. That walk is the part judges feel.

**Founder credibility** is being credibly the person to build this. Strongest when one of two things is true: you've got a direct line to an expert close to you (a friend, family, like my dad), or you've got real social proof for your own expertise. Borrowed credibility counts, so use the people around you.

**The honest bit.** None of this guarantees anything. The field shifts every week and strong builds miss for reasons you can't always see. But it's the model I'd hand past-me, and it beats chasing a cleverer idea every time. Also I've been building these things for about 4 weeks so I'm very new to this as well(I am no Authority).

That's it. No comp running right now, so genuinely, drop what you're building and I'll help where I can or If you guys thought this was any sort of useful then I'll consider making some more in depth youtube videos or posts on my process's and thoughts.Thank you reading my rambles. Take Care.

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What I got wrong in Comp 6, and what I think actually wins