It seems to have failed to even onboard the developer that won the prize and coded Hivestar.

Hi @valued-customer, I'm painfully aware that the retention is next to 0 for these developers as they choose to submit a project, win the prize money and then leave the project in whichever state it was in and take part in some other hackathon.

To avoid these things to happen again, I have already taken appropriate steps. Any future hackathon will release prizes in phases. The developers would have to show their progress and post about it. Once they do, a part of their prize amount will be released. This will help in retention of the developers.

Not only this, our Hive documentation was totally out-dated. This created a lot of problems in development as well as retention. To deal with this, a lot things were done. You can check the DHF proposals to understand it a bit better.

Why didn't you upvote the post, or comment on it? It would seem very little effort went into encouraging @lucirace to participate on Hive if you didn't even upvote or comment on his post announcing Hivestar.

I noticed you didn't upvote that post or comment on it either, so gave them no encouragement to participate on Hive. You say you're not a blogger, and you don't seem to curate the content resulting from your hackathons, nor comment encouragingly.

Unfortunately, my upvote doesn't carry much value. I only recently powered up a little. But I do ask GK (from ecency) to vote those posts. That's the upvote you are seeing. I only recently got in touch with @acidyo and I'll be sharing such post links in OCD as well so that they can get some better curation.

Also, I'm physically present in all these hackathons and interact with all the teams that try to build on Hive chain. They tell me their idea and I try to guide them as to how they can build their vision on our chain. Hivestar was one of those projects.

And then, I have a 30 mins call with all the winning teams individually after the hackathon is concluded, where I tell them more about Hive, what they can do with their winnings (HBD savings, further development of their project, etc) and how they can continue to grow on Hive. But I can't force them to stay.

Are you aware of anyone that has signed up and become a Hive user as a result of these hackathons?

You should understand that onboarding is not the only goal of all the events we are doing in India. No one knew about Hive here. So conducting such events is putting our name out there. Handing out merch to the attendees makes sure that they remember us. These events are increasing our footprint and our network in India is getting stronger day by day.
The investor meet was a result of all these events. No one would have given us an ear had they not seen us in all these events.

Can you provide the cost of the hackathon at which Hivestar was the winner, please?

For the costing, you can check the transactions from VP to my account. It varies from event to event. The number of participants, the sponsorship amount, the publicity we get out of it, the merch, etc are all variables.