Today wraps up the completion of the 24-Hour Challenge at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where our team (skillfully named the “Chicken Bakes”) successfully managed to pull in a 1st-place victory over the 21 teams we competed with 🥳

I couldn’t have made it through this competition without help from the amazing people I had the honor to team up with:

  • Brandon Heng: Your programming skills and API research brought us miles ahead to finishing our product
  • Karlie Sikorski: Your leadership, product design, and UI/UX skills ensured we had a product that people loved using from beginning to end
  • Madison Fama: Your finance and business expertise ensured we made a product that can properly scale and grow to countless heights

I also want to give a shout-out to all the teams that we competed with! We were far from the only team to bring highly-innovative ideas to showcase, and I know we all demonstrated the dedication and skillsets to bring so much potential to life.

What we made

Our team created ✨ PromoPilot ✨: a one-stop, AI-powered solution for companies to perform Marketing in a click (patent-pending 😉).

Here’s what we made in the 24 hours we had available:

Note: Obviously, the demo that we were able to showcase was far from perfect, including in functionality and UI. You can get the gist of what we aimed for though, and our product will be much more fleshed out as we continue forward.

1. Campaigns

Our application takes in marketing campaigns provided by the company running the campaign. This could be in a variety of formats, including PDFs, work messages, or simply whatever works best for the company. For example:

demo of a marketing campaign

This can then be fed into our application through a simple drop-in UI:

file selector

2. Processing

After the marketing campaign information has been uploaded, processing begins to parse out needed information, such as:

  • Company logo
  • Campaign goals
  • Target audiences

With that said, we can proceed to the fun part:

automatic deployment to social platforms 😱

3. Automatic deployment to social platforms (duh)

Now that we have access to the information needed to run a proper campaign, PromoPilot generates the posts needed for various social media platforms. As of the time of writing, this entails LinkedIn and Instagram:

socials example

4. Actually deploying to social platforms

Great, we’ve generated posts, the company has confirmed everything looks good, and the only step left is to click that APPROVE button!

Our system immediately goes to work, running sanity checks to make sure everything is perfect and in running order. Once everything has been fully processed, the social media posts are immediately created and viewable to end users.

For example, check out the campaign document discussed here directly on LinkedIn:

linkedin example

And that’s the workflow for our application! There’s much more we plan on implementing, though the 24-hour demo we created highlights the goal we’re going after.

How we made it

There is a tremendous amount of mental blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creation of our application so that we could make it presentation-ready for our judges.

(…in 24 hours)

The time crunch is what made this competition so demanding. Our team has faced off in multi-week and multi-day competitions in the past, though creating something grand in 24 hours was something we originally weren’t sure how to tackle.

Delegation of priorities was paramount to the success we would eventually achieve. We simply wouldn’t have gotten this done if it wasn’t for the highly-valuable skillsets of everyone on our team, which all were fully utilized to the very last second.

Making it presentable

Not only did we have to make our application itself, we needed to make this product perfect for capturing the attention of our critics. Alongside our application, we had concise, thought-focused conversations to ensure our entire business strategy was good to go, all the way from product descriptions to profitability outlets.

We also reached out to potential business customers directly, and managed to get expected usage rates and valuations for our product.

Go team!

I just can’t stress this enough. Our team would not have gotten where we ended up at if it wasn’t for the contributions from every single member we had. Our skills all played beautifully into the idea we unleashed, and I’m tremendously proud of the work we produced.

Not only did we make something spectacular, but we bonded as a team in ways that can only be created in environments like this. We’re all ready to continue forward down our paths, all alongside each other as we continue to create bigger, better, and more impactful solutions.

P.S. We’d love to hear from you Costco! Rest assured, we always bring the BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!