2025 AUTOMATION HERO OF THE YEAR
JOHN RIPPY
Chief Technology Officer
Drive Social Media | St. Louis, Missouri
95
Steps in Project Phoenix
50%
Dev Time Reduced
3x
Faster Content Creation
282
Team Members
ABOUT
As CTO of Drive Social Media, I lead technology initiatives for a 282-person digital marketing and advertising company. My focus is on building AI-powered automation systems that enable teams to work smarter, not harder.
In 2025, I was recognized as Zapier's Automation Hero of the Year for developing Project Phoenix - a comprehensive sales intelligence and content automation platform that has transformed how our team operates.
PROJECT PHOENIX
95-STEP AI SALES INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM
Project Phoenix is an AI-powered automation pipeline that analyzes prospective clients' digital presence and generates comprehensive competitive intelligence reports.
- Analyzes SEO performance, brand presence, online reviews, and ad campaigns
- Pulls data from SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google, and WHOIS APIs
- Generates competitor analysis with actionable recommendations
- Creates AI-powered blog posts and ad copy suggestions
- Reduces sales prep time from hours to minutes
- Tracks impact end-to-end for continuous improvement
ZAPIER
AI BY ZAPIER
CHATGPT
APIFY
SEMRUSH
AHREFS
CODE BY ZAPIER
ZAPIER TABLES
WEBHOOKS
RESULTS
- Sales prep time reduced from hours to minutes
- 3x faster website content creation using AI-generated drafts
- Web development time cut from four weeks to two
- Team scalability maintained without expanding engineering
- Non-technical teams empowered to build workflows independently
- Consistent content scaling across the organization
