At a company hackathon, we had a outside company sponsoring the hackathon, including a prize they would award to the best user of their API. It was kind of a clunky API, and their product didn't really fit what we did, so my teammate and I decided to use it - hoping that we'd be the only ones to use the API, and therefore winners by default.

We didn't win. Obviously, I'm biased, but I think our product was more promising both in terms of realistic use of the technology, and in terms of the possibility of going to market quickly. But our demo wasn't as shiny, we were from a remote office so people didn't really know who we were, and neither of us were particularly charismatic presenters.

Presentation matters. This has been impressed on us repeatedly; the joke is now that whoever manages to snag the UI/UX person first for their team is going to win.