Challenges

🧨 Buildathon RFP: Unlocking Instagram DMs with AI

Hosted by Gala Labs - Powered by Build Club
💰 $10,000 in cash prizes
📅 Submission deadline: Friday 27 June 11:59PM PST

Gala Labs has open-sourced a new MCP (Multi-Channel Protocol) server that gives developers direct access to Instagram DMs via LLMs. You can now send messages to any Instagram account programmatically — unlocking a powerful new playground for AI automations, agents, and communication workflows.

To celebrate, we’re launching a global Buildathon to see what the most creative minds can do with this stack.

🔍 What You Can Build

Using the Instagram DM MCP server, build a project that leverages programmatic DMs in a new, useful, or ridiculous way.

Some build ideas from Gala Labs:

• AI Dating Coach: slides into DMs with perfect pickup lines

• Manychat Competitor: automates your entire Instagram sales funnel

• Relationship Builder: maintains parasocial relationships for creators

• Multi-agent chaos system: chains DMs with other channels like email, voice, or search

You’re welcome to go even further — remix, extend, or integrate with other tools.

🏆 Prize Pool

$10,000 in total cash prizes, three cash prizes up for grabs:

• $5k - Breaking the internet (go viral AF)

• $2.5k - Technical Sorcery (coolest technical implementation)

• $2.5k - Holy Sh*t Award (make our jaws drop)

Winners will be selected by the Gala Labs team and expert advisors.

📥 How to Submit

All entries must be submitted via Campus platform on Build Club

To enter:

1. Go to this challenge page and connect your project

2. Create a new project

   • Include your GitHub repo (template repo here)

   • Add a demo video or screenshots if possible

   • Use “Gala Labs Instagram Buildathon” in your project name or description

3. Post your project on Twitter/X

   • Tag @gala_labs

4. Ensure your Build Club project is set to public

🛠 Tech Stack & Resources

• MCP Server GitHub Repo: https://github.com/trypeggy/instagram_dm_mcp

• Built with Node.js and supports any LLM (OpenAI, Claude, etc.)

• Easily composable with other APIs, agents, or workflows

• More features dropping throughout the week — stay tuned

📆 Key Dates

• Deadline: Friday 27 June 11:59PM PST

• Winners announced: The following week via @gala_labs and Build Club

🎯 Why Gala Labs Built This

Most automation platforms today are boring, expensive, or over-engineered. Gala Labs built this Instagram DM MCP server to explore what happens when developers are given direct access to high-signal messaging channels — with no artificial limitations.

We believe some of the most exciting applications of LLMs will come from real-time messaging, social interfaces, and agentic behavior.

Now it’s your turn.

Judges:

• Ebaad Ur Rehman

• Annie Liao

• Tanmay

We're calling Australia’s best engineers, AI builders, and healthtech dreamers for a one-day buildathon dedicated to solving problems that actually matter in healthcare 🚀✨.

​This is about building tools that help clinicians save time, make smarter decisions, and improve care - all in one day.

​📅 Date: Thursday, May 30th
🕘 Time: 9:30 AM – 10:00 PM AEDT
📍 Location: Heidi Health offices, Melbourne

​🙌 Who should apply

​🧑‍💻 Technical engineers ready to ship real-world AI apps in a day
🎓 University students eager to break into AI or healthtech
🤝 Indie hackers who love to tinker, build, and learn
🧠 AI professionals & consultants looking to sharpen their skills on high-impact challenges

​🧠 What you’ll build

​You’ll work solo or in a small team to design and prototype an AI-powered tool, app, or website that fits into the future of healthcare.
Use real devtools. Get mentored. Build something that makes a portfolio pop and a clinician smile.

​🧩 Core themes

​🧠 Clinical decision support · 🤖 Workflow automation · 📊 Data visualisation · ❤️ Patient experience · 🗃️ Record digitisation
Projects can span internal hospital tools, patient-facing apps, or intelligent infrastructure powered by LLMs, agents, and modern web stacks.

​🧬 About Heidi Health

​Heidi Health is a leading Australian healthtech startup transforming clinical workflows with AI-powered tools. Their flagship product, an AI medical scribe, streamlines documentation and enables seamless collaboration between clinicians.

​🤝 Sponsors

​Proudly supported by:

• ​GCP – Scalable infrastructure and AI tooling to power healthcare innovation

• ​Bland AI – AI-powered phone agents that handle real conversations at scale

• ​Windsurf – Dev copilot built to help you ship full-stack AI apps faster

• ​Relevance AI – Workflow engine for building powerful AI agents and automations

• ​CrewAI – Framework for multi-agent AI systems that collaborate on complex tasks

• ​Composio – Low-code automation for integrating APIs and SaaS tools

• ​Mem0 – Vector-native OS for storing and querying memory with natural language

🔍 Techstars Sydney Build Challenge: Find the Hidden Founders

Sign up by: May 26 (midnight AEST)
Submit by: June 7

Some of the best founders are hidden in plain sight. They’re not posting on LinkedIn — they’re heads down building. They’re scale-up veterans whose options are vesting. Migrants building quiet empires. PhD researchers with IP ready to spin out.

We want you to help us find and map them.

🧠 The Challenge

Build a searchable database of under-the-radar founder talent. Your product should help surface high-potential current and future founders across Australia.

Must include fields for:

• Name

• LinkedIn

• City

• Startup name (if applicable)

• Tags (e.g. “scale-up alum,” “side project builder,” “PhD researcher,” “migrant founder”)

• Diversity measures:

  • Required: Gender, Ethnicity

  • Optional: LGBTQI+, Neurodivergent, Age, Migrant status

🔎 Suggested Data Sources

You're free to be creative, but here are a few to start:

• LinkedIn (roles, career trajectories, side project links)

• Community groups (Slack/Discords, meetup lists, university clubs)

• Crunchbase (stealth startups, early stage company staff)

• University and research websites

• Founder Twitter/X, Product Hunt, GitHub

You can scrape, research, or crowdsource — as long as the end product is insightful and usable.

🧑‍⚖️ Judging

Projects will be judged by the Techstars team based on:

• Data insight and quality

• Filterable, usable UX

• Creativity in uncovering non-obvious talent

🏆 What You Can Win

Major prize: $2K prize pool ($1.5K first, $500 second)

• 🚀 Fast-tracked interview to the Techstars Sydney Accelerator

  • US$120k investment + 13-week in-person program

• 💼 3 x warm intros to top VCs if you're looking to spin this into a startup

• 🧢 Bonus perks from our sponsor pool:

  • Cloud credits

  • Discounted co-working space memberships

  • Free subscriptions to AI tools

  • Strategy sessions

🧠 Prompt Inspiration

Think:

• 4-year scale-up engineer ready to jump

• PhD close to finishing, researching AI, bio, or deeptech

• SMB operator now launching SaaS tools

• Hackathon winners not yet “in the ecosystem”

• Migrant entrepreneurs running businesses under the radar

👉 How to Join

• Register your interest by May 26

• Submit your entry by June 5

• Solo or teams welcome

• Open to all Australia-based builders

Let’s uncover the next wave of builders — before they’re headlines.

Welcome to our weekly challenge! Learn, build, get showcased and win big! 🚀

Show us what you can build in Lovable - apps, websites and games!

Best submission wins 30 days free Lovable credits, social media shout outs from the Lovable and Build Club teams as well as a one of a kind self care love package 💓.

📑Criteria:

• Creativity

• Utility and usability

• UI

• wow factor! ✨

Winner announced in 1 week

🧑‍⚖️Judges:

• Talisha - Community lead at Lovable

• Ebaad - Head of AI learning at Build Club