Four students. One ambitious idea. Just a couple of hours to turn it into a working MVP.
On June 7, I joined Digithon in Sofia as a mentor to a team of four students from TUES. They were in 10th and 11th grade, aged 16-17, but they approached the challenge with the energy and ambition of a team preparing to launch a real product.
By the end of the day, they had built an AI-assisted revenue management system designed for large grocery chains in the United States.
That result was impressive. The people behind it were even more impressive.
A Real Product for a Real Problem
The team chose a problem with consequences beyond a hackathon presentation.
Large grocery retailers need to keep the right products available at the right time. Underestimate demand and shelves remain empty. Overestimate it and stores are left with excess inventory, unnecessary costs, and more food waste.
The students built a revenue management system with an AI layer for forecasting demand. The goal was simple to explain but difficult to deliver: help stores make better inventory decisions so customers can find what they need while retailers reduce surplus.
Within hours, the team moved from an idea to a working MVP they could demonstrate.
They had to understand the problem, decide what mattered most, divide the work, make technical choices, and keep moving despite the time pressure. Those are the same skills professional engineering teams use when building products under real delivery constraints.
Mentorship Is Not About Taking Over
The role of a mentor is not to take the keyboard and build the solution for the team.
It is to help people ask better questions.
What is the smallest version of the idea that proves its value? Which part of the problem should be solved first? What can be simplified without losing the purpose of the product? How do you explain the solution clearly to someone seeing it for the first time?
Good mentorship creates enough direction for a team to move forward while leaving the decisions and the achievement in their hands.
The students brought the curiosity, ideas, and determination. My responsibility was to share perspective from building real systems and help them apply it to the challenge in front of them.
A Different Kind of Win
Digithon was a competition, and the rewards were reserved for the winning teams. Our team did not finish in the top three, and it is important to say that plainly.
That does not take anything away from the teams that earned those places. But a ranking is only one way to measure what a team achieved.
For me, my team was the winning one.
Four students aged 16-17 proved how far they could go when they were trusted with an ambitious problem. In only a couple of hours, they moved from an initial idea to a working MVP. They defined the problem, narrowed the scope, made technical decisions, divided the work, and built something they could demonstrate.
That journey matters. Going from idea to MVP is difficult even for experienced product teams. Watching these students do it under pressure showed that their potential reaches far beyond the result of a single competition.
They may not have left with one of the official prizes, but they left having proved something more important to themselves: they are already capable of turning ambitious ideas into real products.
Why ApplauseLab Makes Time for Mentorship
At ApplauseLab, we spend our days building software, AI systems, and products intended to solve difficult business problems.
That experience becomes more valuable when we share it.
We are always looking for practical ways to support emerging developers, whether through mentoring, workshops, community events, or simply making time to explain what we have learned from delivering production systems.
The next generation of developers does not only need access to technology. They need access to people who can help them understand the decisions behind it: how to reduce an idea to something buildable, how to recover when an approach fails, how to communicate clearly, and how to keep the user’s problem ahead of the technology.
If we want a stronger engineering community, we cannot only benefit from it. We have to invest time and experience back into it.
Leading by Example
“Leading by example” is easy to include in a company values document. It matters more when it becomes something people actually do.
For us, that means showing up.
It means helping without taking credit for someone else’s work. It means sharing lessons that took years to learn. It means encouraging young developers to attempt problems that may initially appear too large for them.
Most importantly, it means treating their ideas seriously.
These four students did not need anyone to lower expectations because of their age. They needed the space, guidance, and confidence to meet a difficult challenge. What they built at Digithon showed exactly why that confidence was deserved.
The Future Looks Promising
The most memorable part of Digithon was not the technology itself.
It was seeing students aged 16-17 discuss product scope, AI, forecasting, retail operations, and implementation trade-offs while working together to deliver something tangible.
That is a strong signal for the future of Bulgaria’s technology community.
We are proud to support events that give emerging developers a place to test themselves, learn from experienced builders, and discover how much they are already capable of achieving.
Thank you to Digitalk Conference, Capital, Appolica, and WorkBetter for creating that opportunity, and special thanks to Ilian Kodzhahristov for the invitation.
