Welcome to HackerNoon’s Meet the Hackathon Winner interview series, where we peel back the layers of winning projects across our hackathons for a peek at the technical and operational decisions that propelled them to our winners’ podium.

Meet Packworks: Proof of Usefulness Hackathon Winner in the Bright Data Category

Packworks was one of four projects named winners in the first round of the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon’s Bright Data Awards. The company describes its platform as an operating system for general trade in Southeast Asia and reports supporting more than 335,000 sari-sari stores across the Philippines.

Following its selection as a Bright Data Award winner, we caught up with the Packworks team to revisit the project and explore how Bright Data could help expand its retail intelligence capabilities.

INTERVIEW

What does this Bright Data category win mean for Packworks?

This award is a unique validation of our mission to digitize the "invisible" 86% of the informal retail market. Earning a 313 Proof of Usefulness score confirms that our current and planned use of advanced data infrastructure—including Bright Data for web scraping and collection that gathers real-time pricing and product information from public e-commerce websites—delivers genuine, market-validated utility for our 300K plus sari-sari store users, shining much needed light on these hard working micro-retail entrepreneurs. It amplifies our commitment to democratizing data, showing that equipping grassroots "saripreneurs" with the right insights can spark measurable economic growth and resilience.

Packworks already provides visibility into transactions across sari-sari stores. What part of the wider Philippine retail market is still missing from that picture?

We excel at digitizing the Philippines’ largely “data-dark” informal retail market. However, we currently lack real-time visibility into competitor pricing and activity across online and modern trade channels.

How can Bright Data help Packworks close this visibility gap?

Bright Data could automate the collection of external market data, giving us a clearer view of competitor pricing across online and modern trade channels. This would allow us to benchmark sari-sari store pricing against the broader Philippine retail market.

What Bright Data products or services in particular is Packworks most excited to explore?

We would explore Bright Data’s Scraper Studio and Web Scraper APIs to build automated, self-healing data pipelines that collect real-time pricing and product information from public e-commerce websites.

Its Retail Intelligence products and ready-made datasets could also give us access to large volumes of structured e-commerce data without requiring Packworks to build and maintain its own scraping infrastructure.

We could use the SERP API to monitor search results across multiple engines, helping us track brand mentions, regional demand, and competitor promotions.

Bright Data’s residential proxies would support localized data collection through real-user IPs, helping us access regional pricing and market information while reducing disruptions from anti-bot systems and CAPTCHAs.

What insights could Bright Data provide that would be difficult to obtain otherwise?

Bright Data could help us combine Packworks’ proprietary offline transaction data with online e-commerce signals, creating “phygital” market intelligence that would be difficult to obtain through traditional field visits alone.

It could also give us real-time visibility into competitor price changes and online promotions, allowing us to assess whether Precision Marketing campaigns across the sari-sari network remain competitive with regional online prices.

Through Bright Data’s proxy network, we could also view localized advertisements and pricing as they appear to users across different Philippine regions, with targeting by carrier and ASN.

What’s next for Packworks? Is there anything on the roadmap that you’re especially excited to build or launch?

Packworks is entering an incredibly high-growth phase, rolling out embedded fintech and AI at scale. We are particularly excited to launch our proprietary e-wallet, which will serve as the foundation for credit scoring and inventory financing for our network of over 300K sari-sari stores nationwide -- filling a very real need for our users. Additionally, we are scaling our AI Store Insighting Project (SIP) by investing in GPU-powered servers to provide predictive machine learning down to the individual SKU level. This will help further deepen our usefulness to our core users, ecosystem partners and the wider communities we indirectly serve by providing the digital tools needed to build resiliency and sustainability for these micro-businesses.

Finally, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone thinking about entering a HackerNoon Hackathon?

Packworks' approach to usefulness has always focused on "utility over hype" -- that's why we stripped down our app, removing bells and whistles to make its use as frictionless as possible. We've found that the most impactful projects solve a real-world infrastructure gap with a technical build that prioritizes usability and measurable results over an overengineered solution that unnecessarily adds complexity to the workflow. Ensure that your UX translates to ease of use, consistently check usage patterns and listen for feedback to continuously improve on your product and platform. Lastly, use the data you have gathered to tell stories of genuine traction and share your learnings with others—HackerNoon is the perfect platform to put your build in front of a community that values technical expertise and actual user adoption.

You Could Be Our Next Winner

The Proof of Usefulness Hackathon is open until August 10, 2026, and your project could be next on our winners’ podium. Submit your work, show us the problem you’re solving, and prove its real-world usefulness.