About
More ideas than time.
Hi, I'm Nick Murto, founder of Hacksathon.com, and that's been my whole life, honestly. I'm a designer and an idea guy. I was never a programmer. Even back when I built web pages, it was copy and paste, never writing code of my own. But ideas come naturally to me. I see a problem and my brain floods with solutions whether I asked it to or not. I get that from my dad, who built his own house with his own hands. The only thing he hired out was the carpet.
Twenty years of ideas, one bottleneck
In 2004, Tyler Lafferty and I launched Seven2, a creative agency. Later came a second agency, 14Four, and then Strategy Labs with Ramsey Pruchnik. For two decades I got to work with insanely talented creative people, and I never stopped bringing them ideas.
Here's one. You know that moment at every dinner when someone says “I need a new show, what have you been watching?” That conversation happens at every table in America. So in 2019 I had an idea called Been Watching. My friends and I were literally running it out of a shared Apple Notes doc: shows we want to watch, shows we're watching, a one-to-three star rating when we're done. It worked, but it was duct tape.
I brought Been Watching to my agency team, like I'd done with ideas for years. They did beautiful branding work, some UI, a little development between client projects. Five years later, it still wasn't real. Not because they weren't brilliant, but because client work always comes first. That's the fate of most good ideas inside busy companies: they wait.
Then I stopped waiting
In 2024 I went deep into AI, and in July of that year I discovered vibe coding. My first attempt was a little app idea born from doing three-minute planks at the gym. It fought me, and I shelved it. Then I tried building Been Watching myself, and hit walls there too.
What changed everything was a friend. Tony Rosland, a photographer who was deep into vibe coding his own platform, Studio Ledger, took me under his wing and got me set up with real tools. Suddenly I was making progress I couldn't believe. I'd build before work, run Seven2 all day, and build again at night. It was some of the most fun I've ever had. A few months later, Been Watching was real, fully working, polished the way a designer polishes things. My friends ditched the Notes doc. And word got back to me that one of my senior developers admitted he was a little envious: the thing his team had circled for years, I'd built in months. Without writing code.
That plank app fought me for almost two years. I killed it three times. Then the tools caught up, and in March 2026, HyperChrono went live in the Apple App Store. I've been an Apple fanboy my whole life, so I'll just say it: how many people do you know with their own app in the App Store? I still use it for every plank.
The tool nobody used
Meanwhile, back at my own agency, almost nobody was touching AI. My team was nervous, and honestly, our clients (big corporations, worried about copyright) were banning AI outright. I kept telling people it felt like the early days of Napster: the industry can resist, but the path is inevitable.
So I tried to help. On a four-hour flight to Spokane, I built an idea-sharing tool for my team, about ninety percent of it on airplane wi-fi. I built an AI planning tool. I built a doc editor. Good tools, honestly. And almost nobody used them.
Then, in early 2026, I tried something different. Instead of handing my team tools, I designed an event: structured, multi-week, low-pressure, where everyone would build something they personally wanted to exist. The tools I'd already built slotted in perfectly, like they'd been waiting for it. We pitched Shark Tank style (people wore costumes). We built in short sessions between client work. We demoed, we voted, we celebrated.
And then the thing happened that changed my plans: after it ended, my team kept building. People who'd been unsure what their first prompt should be were shipping tools all on their own. The conversations changed. That was my aha moment. The tools were never the answer. The experience was.
Why Hacksathon.com exists
I believe creative people are secretly the best builders in this new era. Ideas, taste, usability, the ability to imagine what something should feel like: those are the superpowers now, and technical skill is no longer the gate. I watched it happen to me, and then I watched it happen to a whole team of producers, designers, and strategists.
Hacksathon.com is that event, rebuilt as a platform any organization can run on its own. We help people realize they can create solutions they never thought possible. I know it works, because I was the first person it worked on.