Our first hackathon where we actually had to think like a startup

I am a third year CSE student and last week someone handed me a problem statement and said build a startup in 6 weeks. Not a college project. Not an assignment. An actual product that solves an actual problem for actual people. That was two weeks ago. And honestly those two weeks taught me more than the last two semesters combined. The first few days were just reading and rereading the problem. We kept thinking we understood it and then realising we did not. There is a big difference between reading a problem statement and actually understanding the people you are building for. We went back to basics. Who uses this? What do they earn? What does a bad day look like for them? What would actually help them versus what just sounds good in a pitch? That took almost a full week. And I think that was the most important week. Building something is the easy part honestly. Figuring out what to build and why is the hard part. Most teams skip that and go straight to coding. We almost did too. Week