Marketly

Turn cultural data into a creative, platform-specific marketing campaign

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Inspiration

As a solo founder in a network of early-stage startups and indie businesses, one harsh truth keeps coming up: marketing is our make-or-break factor.

You could have the best product, but if your social media campaign doesn't resonate with your audience, you’re invisible.

We realized that for most solo founders and small teams, marketing on social media is harder than building the actual product.

Why is that?

Because trends change daily, buzzwords burn out, new content goes viral every other week and every social media platform has its own distinct personality.

Even billion-dollar legacy companies are struggling to stay culturally relevant to their audience.

That’s what inspired me to build Marketly, a webapp that helps startups and brands establish their social media presence by understanding and aligning their content with the cultural tastes of their target audience.

What it does

Marketly is an AI-powered culture-specific marketing strategy generator that combines:

✅ Qloo’s Taste API:

To understand the target audience’s preferences in music, entertainment, lifestyle, etc.

✅ LLM (GPT-4):

To craft platform-specific marketing strategies tailored to these tastes.

Steps

  1. Business Information Collection: Users fill out a multi-step form with their business details, target audience, and marketing goals.

  2. Cultural Analysis: The system analyzes the target audience using Qloo's cultural intelligence API and GPT-4 to generate detailed taste profiles.

  3. Strategy Generation: GPT-4 creates culture-specific marketing strategies including:

  • A cultural taste profile of their target audience
  • A full marketing campaign with a content calendar and ad scripts for each platform
  • A "viral hook generator" that turns Qloo insights into tweet hooks, TikTok ideas, etc.
  • Platform-by-platform marketing strategy (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn)
  • Content types that will resonate with their audience
  • Buzzwords and tones to use
  • Influencer outreach suggestions with templates

All based on real taste insights, not guesswork.

How we built it

  • Qloo’s Taste API is used to extract cultural and content preferences of a specified target audience
  • The returned data is fed into OpenAI GPT-4 with custom prompt engineering to generate strategies specific to each social media platform.
  • Built with TypeScript + React
  • Deployed on Netlify
  • Designed for extensibility, future modules can plug into ad platforms or CRM tools

Challenges we ran into

  • Formatting the AI responses was tricky, GPT loves to chat so we needed strict JSON for parsing
  • Parsing Qloo data into a prompt that the LLM could truly understand and convert into strategy took trial and error
  • Working solo meant juggling design, code, bugs and deadlines all at once

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Fully functional prototype that takes real Qloo insights and returns usable, platform-aware marketing advice
  • Clean UI/UX to prevent clutter and put more focus on the content
  • Insights and platform-specific content suggestions make the experience feel like talking to a cultural strategist
  • Successfully integrated two powerful AI systems (Qloo + OpenAI GPT 4) into a creative, startup-relevant use case for fellow builders.

What we learned

  • Cultural data makes AI smarter. Feeding GPT vague info gets vague results but feeding it real taste preferences produces gold.
  • Prompt design is everything. Getting GPT to produce structured, on-brand outputs took heavy experimentation.

What's next for Marketly

  • Allow users to save and manage multiple campaigns or client profiles
  • Partner with influencer and ad platforms to run Marketly-generated strategies with one click

Our ultimate goal: Get Qloo's API to make cultural intelligence + AI accessible to every founder and small business trying to make a dent in the digital world.

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