Jeff Gipson takes first place in Cape Girardeau competition for software addressing a real-world farm financial planning challenge

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MISSOURI—Recruiters Websites founder Jeff Gipson recently earned first place and a $5,000 prize at Cape Girardeau’s inaugural AgTech Vibeathon, a multi-day coding competition hosted by Codefi that challenged participants to build working software addressing real problems in agriculture.

Gipson took first place in the Farm Financial Planning challenge, called “Baseline,” which focused on a problem facing mid-scale corn and soybean farmers across the Midwest.

Farmers routinely make significant investments in seed, fertilizer, equipment and other inputs without independent benchmarks to determine how their costs and margins compare with similar operations. The challenge asked participants to create a platform where farmers could compare per-field costs and margins against anonymized, regionally aggregated peer data before making purchasing decisions.

Gipson’s Baseline project earned the top prize in the Farm Financial Planning category.

“AI is most useful when you start with a real problem instead of starting with the technology,” said Gipson. “That’s what appealed to me about the Vibeathon. We were given an actual business problem and asked to build something useful around it. That’s also how we think about technology at Recruiters Websites. The goal isn’t to use AI for the sake of using AI. It’s to find practical ways it can help businesses do things that were previously too expensive, too time-consuming or simply out of reach.”

That approach is also influencing new technology being developed at Recruiters Websites. Gipson recently led the development of RW iQ, a platform the company’s marketing team uses to provide expanded marketing services for recruiting firms, including blog and social content and SEO focused on visibility in both traditional and AI search.

The project is part of Recruiters Websites’ continued investment in software and AI capabilities that complement its website development and marketing services for the recruiting and staffing industry.

About Recruiters Websites:

Recruiters Websites provides websites and marketing services exclusively for the recruiting and staffing industry. Since 2012, the company has helped thousands of recruiting firms across the United States improve their online presence and reach clients and candidates through website development, SEO, content, digital advertising, branding and marketing technology. Learn more at recruiterswebsites.com.