Explorium Hackathon Victory - Thunai Wins Best AI Automation Workflow

We are humbled and ecstatic to announce that Thunai was crowned the Winner of the Explorium Hackathon! 

8 Tools Integrated, 100% Automated Execution, Zero Manual Input, and a revolutionary framework that turns competitor engagement into revenue.

How Did Thunai Win The Explorium Hackathon? 

We entered the arena with a collaborative task force: The Thunai AI engineering team and our Marketing strategists. The competition was fierce, filled with brilliant developers and complex automations.

We expected to build a solid integration, maybe get a nod for technical proficiency.

What we built instead was a fully autonomous growth engine.

It started with a simple question during our brainstorming session: "Where are our perfect customers hiding?" 

The answer? They are currently talking to our competitors. They are commenting on their posts, liking their updates, and engaging with their content. They are signaling intent, right now.

This isn't just a technical win for us. It is proof of our philosophy that Marketing and AI must function as a single organism.

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The Outcome of Our Automation Process?

‍In the end, what we delivered was a masterclass in workflow orchestration.

While other teams focused on simple data movement, we were locked in a race to build a system that mimics human intuition at machine speed.

Every time a competitor posted, we wanted to know. Every time a prospect engaged, we wanted their details.

We ran the script. For a moment, nothing happened. It felt like a gut punch. Had the API limits hit? Did the n8n webhook fail? 

But then, the Google Sheet began to populate. Not just with names, but with emails, revenue numbers, and fully written, hyper-personalized email drafts. 

The data poured in, row after row, in a stunning surge of automation that completed the loop just as we presented to the judges.

Results were in: Thunai took the top prize for the most effective AI Automation Workflow.

The Breakdown of Our Winning Workflow:

The judges were impressed not just by the result, but by how we chained these tools together. Here is the exact breakdown of the Thunai "Competitor Sniping" Engine:

1. The Backbone (n8n & Google Sheets): Everything starts here. We use n8n as the central nervous system, pulling a target list of competitor URLs from Google Sheets. This isn't just a database; it is the trigger that sets the entire army of bots in motion.
   
2. The Scout (Apify): This is where the magic begins. We use Apify to extract the LinkedIn profile of the target competitor. But we don't stop there. Apify then scans the "New Post" interactions, scraping the specific users who have liked or commented in the last 24 hours. We are capturing intent while it is still hot.
3. The Bridge (JavaScript): Raw data is messy. We utilize custom JavaScript to clean and populate these interaction lists back into Google Sheets. It acts as the translator, ensuring the data is perfectly formatted for the next stage of the attack.
   
4. The Enrichment (PhantomBuster): Now we go deep. PhantomBuster takes those indirect profile links and converts them into direct Company Profile URLs. It then enriches our sheet with critical intelligence: Position, Company Name, Company Size, Revenue, Industry, and Physical Address. We aren't just guessing anymore; we know exactly who they are.
   
5. The Deep Dive (Explorium): Using the hosting platform's power, we take the direct link to generate a unique Prospect ID. This allows us to extract the "Gold Data": Personal and Business Email IDs, Phone Numbers, and a full suite of social media handles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
   
6. The Gatekeeper (Smartly): Data hygiene is non-negotiable. Before we draft a single message, emails are imported into Smartly for rigorous validation. Only the clean, deliverable emails are pushed forward to the next stage. We protect your domain reputation at all costs. 

The AI That Acts Execution

Most workflows stop at the email address. This is where Thunai separates itself from the pack. We created a bifurcated system to ensure no lead is left behind.

Branch A: Hyper-Personalized Email Campaign

For valid emails, we don't just dump them in a CRM. We utilize an LLM (Large Language Model) to analyze the prospect's organization, position, industry, and the specific post they interacted with.

The AI generates a curated, targeted email that references their recent activity. This isn't a generic template. It is a unique message drafted for that specific human and posted directly to the output sheet.

But we don't stop at drafting.

In the final step, the generated email content is pushed back from Google Sheets into Smartly. Smartly then executes the outreach, delivering these personalized emails directly to the prospect's inbox. No human hits "send." The system identifies, writes, and delivers automatically.

Branch B: LinkedIn Outreach

For invalid emails, the lead isn't lost. They are pushed to a secondary "Manual Outreach" sheet. 

Since we already scraped their LinkedIn and social media accounts, your sales team can click one link to DM them directly. We automate 90% of the work so your humans can focus on the final 10%.

Challenges When Executing Our AI Workflow

Creating Prospect ID

Linking raw social data to a unique identifier in Explorian was a logic nightmare. We had to ensure every fragmented scrap of data mapped perfectly to a single entity without creating duplicates.

One wrong variable meant the whole data chain collapsed, so we had to engineer a custom validation logic from scratch.

Limited N8N Nodes Needed HTTP Requests

Standard automation tools weren't built for this level of complexity.

We maxed out the standard N8N nodes almost immediately, forcing us to bypass the easy path and code raw HTTP requests manually. It was the digital equivalent of hot-wiring a car to keep the engine running under pressure.

LinkedIn Message Automation - Invites Need to be Accepted First

We hit a hard reality: you can't automate a relationship without a handshake.

Since we couldn't DM prospects until they accepted our invites, we hit a massive bottleneck in speed. This forced us to pivot, prioritizing email for immediate impact while nurturing LinkedIn connections in the background.

Cookies Session Error Phatom Buster

The connection was fragile. PhantomBuster relies on active browser cookies to mimic human behavior, and they kept timing out or getting invalidated mid-scrape. 

‍We were constantly resetting session IDs, racing against security protocols that tried to lock us out of our own tools right when we needed them most.

Join the Revolution and Automate Your Growth

The response from the Explorium judges and the hackathon community has been a resounding confirmation: the industry is tired of lazy outreach. The world is ready for an AI that targets with precision. 

To celebrate this win and thank the community that pushed us to innovate, we are opening up this workflow strategy to our users.

For a limited time, get access to the logic that won us the gold.

To revolutionize your sales process, look at how Thunai turns simple data into complex, revenue-generating actions.

Want to see what Thunai does with AI? Try it out for yourself!