Why did I build Social Image?

Too long didn't read (TLDR)

I noticed that there was no easy way to mass generate social media graphics for over 100 sessions at a conference. No marketing tools existed to ease the pain of creating 100 unique images and keeping those images updated with constant session changes (new speakers, new titles, new session ID’s etc). Graphic designers were spending so many hours performing a task that could be automated.

The Reason

Back in 2017 I joined a large tech company as a web developer. One of my initial tasks was to handle automating the manual tasks carried out for their global tech conference. My marketing manager at the time was spending hours creating unique social media graphics for over 100 sessions! Sometimes they would not even create these images and lacked a professional social presence as a result. He asked me if I could come up with a Python script to automate the process. Within a few hours I had written the initial example script to generate over 100 unique images in less than 1 minute. This opened the eyes of my team to the true power of being able to automate manual tasks with a fairly simple, yet powerful, script.

I’ve used that particular script for automating the generation of images for over 600 sessions. The marketing team used the images for promoting sessions on social media, displays on the entrance of session rooms at hotels, YouTube thumbnails and social media share images via meta tags. Needless to say, we used them extensively!

Say an individual image took a graphic designer 5 minutes to create, multiply that by 100 sessions and take 1.5 revisions of average per session. That equals:

750 minutes or 12 hours and 30 minutes (with no breaks) to create manually what I could do in a 1 minute. Only 750% faster!

Over the past 3 years I’ve gained a vast amount of experience being the only web developer working for a global tech company. I’ve since decided that this was too good to keep to myself and have therefore decided to create a SaaS marketing tool for everyone to take advantage of. This tool is the most advanced one of it’s kind available. I’ve started fresh from a completely different code base, deployed it serverlessly via AWS and ensured the performance of the app is outstanding using a React front-end and a GraphQL API.

The possibilities of this tool are endless and I probably still haven’t accounted for all the possible use cases that you will come up with! If you get time, drop me and email and let me know what you think of the app; that is of course once you’re done having fun saving countless hours improving your social presence!

kyle@socialimage.app