Achievia
AI study-abroad coaching for Vietnamese students — built for the speaking and writing their schools skip.
- Event
- LotusHacks 2026 (HackHarvard × GenAI Fund)
- Result
- Top 20 of 200
- Duration
- 36 hours
- My role
- Pitch lead, market research, live demo
- Team
- 4 — I owned the narrative layer
- Stack
- ElevenLabs, Bright Data, Manus AI
TL;DR
36-hour build unifying IELTS/SAT prep, university matching, and scholarship discovery. I owned the pitch, market research, user framing, and the live demo. Top 20 of 200.
The user
VN public-school English drills grammar, reading, and listening — rarely speaking or writing. The gap shows at application time: interviews, essays, scholarships. We scoped to those students and built the Speaking Coach (ElevenLabs voice) around them.
What I did
I didn’t write code — I owned the narrative layer: market research, user framing, the pitch, and the live demo. Ran it end-to-end and fielded judge questions solo. Translating technical work for a non-technical room is my core skill.
Hardest 36 hours
Halfway in we were proving the problem, validating users, designing, and building all at once — on no sleep — and decisions started slipping. We took a walk, reset, and made our best scoping calls right after.
Honest framing
No live demo to link — a teammate locked the repo post-event. The proof is the deck, the write-up, and the Top 20 result. Next time I’d treat the hackathon as networking, not just competition.
Artifacts
- LinkedIn write-up — LotusHacks 2026Open ↗
- Pitch deck — Achievia (PDF)Download ↓
- GitHub repositoryLocked by repo owner post-event
Next project
WWS →