Kevin Hester, Daniel Vencil, and Ted Ryskoski did not come to the Gloo AI Hackathon planning to build an AI product.

They came to experience it.

Kevin has spent more than 30 years working in technology, primarily in audio, video, and lighting; Daniel works across music and service programming at Clear Creek Community Church; and Ted oversees video production and provides strategic oversight across the church's campuses.

They understand technology, but building an AI application was something else entirely.

“When we first got invited to the Hackathon, we were gonna come to it and…just go experience it,” Kevin remembers.

Then someone told them they were on a team.

Their response was pretty simple: “Okay, what does that mean?”

A lot of people assume the Heroes of the Hackathon are the people who walked in knowing exactly what they were doing.

Clear Creek didn't.

They figured it out anyway.

Straight Into the Deep End

There was no polished idea waiting for them.

They had little experience with the tools available to them. They didn't start building when the 30-day window opened. In fact, it took them a while just to figure out what problem they wanted to solve.

“It definitely felt like we were pushed into the deep end,” Daniel says.

That meant a lot of trial and error.

They researched. They experimented. They used tools like the app builder Lovable and several large language models to help them understand what they were doing. A fourth teammate with coding experience helped clean things up when they needed it. 

But before they could figure out how to build anything, they had to answer the harder question: What was actually worth building?

Eventually, they landed on building something related to generosity.

How Do You Make Generosity More Accessible?

The team knew what money could mean in a believer's life.

They had seen the hold it could have on people. They had also seen what could happen when someone began to think differently about what they had and what it was for.

So they started with a question: How could we make generosity more accessible?

Not just for someone with significant financial resources. For anyone.

They began imagining a tool that could help people see their resources differently and find practical opportunities to invest in something beyond themselves.

They also knew immediately what they weren't going to solve.

Financial accounts, privacy, security, and the enormous amount of infrastructure required to actually move people's money were well beyond the scope of what they could responsibly tackle at a Hackathon.

Their job wasn't to build the entire financial system. It was to explore the idea.

That distinction became one of their biggest lessons.

They Built Too Much

AI made building feel surprisingly easy.

And that created a new problem.

Once the team realized what vibe coding could do, their idea started growing.

And growing.

And growing.

“It started building something that was so large because it seemed so easy,” Ted says. “But then it just got really complex.”

By the time they arrived in Boulder for the final sprint, they realized they had overestimated how prepared they were. They had more work to catch up on than expected and a product that had become more complicated than it needed to be.

This is one of the useful lessons from their story.

The fact that you can build almost anything doesn't mean you should.

AI is lowering the barrier between an idea and something functional. But that makes judgment more important, not less.

What is the smallest real problem you can solve?

Who exactly are you solving it for?

What does the first useful version actually need to do?

Clear Creek learned those questions by getting some of them wrong.

That's building too.

Then Something Changed

They finished with a tangible application.

It wasn't perfect. Kevin was the first to say it wasn't the most efficient or streamlined version they could have built.

But it worked.

A few months earlier, none of them had been thinking about building an application like this at all.

Now they had. And that changed the way they saw the problems around them.

Kevin says he now catches himself looking at problems and thinking: “We can just go vibe code that.”

The most important thing Clear Creek brought home from Boulder may not have been the thing they built, but the realization that they could build.

A problem that once would have required finding a vendor, securing a budget, or simply living with the friction suddenly prompted a different response: Could we solve this ourselves?

The Room Changed Them Too

There was one other thing they got wrong before arriving.

They expected competition.

People guarding their ideas. Teams protecting their research. Experienced developers sizing up inexperienced ones.

They found almost exactly the opposite.

People they had never met stopped to ask what they were building. Experienced technologists encouraged them. Builders working on global problems took their ideas seriously.

Kevin says the team was “literally blown away” by it.

“You'll find yourself in conversations with people who are well-versed in what we're doing here,” he says. “They're coding on top level, and they're solving literally global problems. And just to have that kind of interaction and the humanity behind it all was such a shock and such a gift.”

That's something we’ve heard again and again from the Heroes we've talked to.

The Hackathon may have prizes, but the people in the room don't behave like the person next to them has to lose for them to win.

They help each other build.

What They'd Do Differently

Ask the Clear Creek team what they would tell another ministry leader considering the Hackathon, and their advice is refreshingly practical.

Think small.

Pick a real problem. Make it narrow. Especially the first time.

Going through the process of solving one small problem gives you the foundation to tackle much bigger ones later.

And second:

Don't do it alone.

You don't necessarily need a team filled with developers. You need people who think differently. Someone who understands the problem. Someone who can think strategically. Someone who can manage a project. Someone willing to experiment.

Clear Creek had a team.

That mattered.

Because building together wasn't just how they finished the app.

It was how they learned what they were capable of.

Heroes Don't Always Walk In Knowing They're Builders

Heroes of the Hackathon aren't necessarily the people with the most technical experience. They're not necessarily the people who win.

They're people who take what they know, bring it into the room, and use it to build something that could serve someone else.

Sometimes they arrive with a company and a product.

Sometimes they arrive with years of engineering experience.

And sometimes they arrive thinking they're there to watch.

Then someone tells them:

You're on a team. Go build something.

And they do.

That experience followed the Clear Creek team home.

Now, when they see a problem inside their ministry, there's one more possibility on the table:

Maybe we can build something for that.

And sometimes, that's where impact starts.