WORDS Tara Crutchfield
PHOTOGRAPH Photo Provided
Promo Applications hasn’t afforded him much free time to coach, he plans to pick it back up and continue throughout his life.
A twenty-seven-year-old Polk County native is soon to launch an app poised to revolutionize the event and promotion scene. The Promo App, an event-based social network, will be a valuable tool for organizations from the local Rotary Club and the Ritz to coffee shops and concert halls. According to their website, “By signing up, users can browse a live feed of public events with real-time event information, or create and share their own events.” In addition to connecting users to events in their area, organizers can sell tickets from the platform, manage events with an easy-to-use dashboard, and track sales. So who is the twentysomething from Lake Wales behind Promo, and what are the big ideas behind it?
CREATING VALUE The Promo story starts in Sewanee, Tennessee. O’Neill was in his second semester at the Episcopal liberal-arts college and found himself walking through the cafeteria with nothing to do. He saw a few kids he had classes with and sat down with them. With no other classes scheduled that day, the group had a three-hour lunch talking about a business idea one of them had. The idea for the app, then called Vivism, was a much different iteration of what Promo is today. Of the three original partners, only O’Neill is still involved with the business.
George O’Neill was born and raised in Polk County. He attended St. Joseph Catholic School through sixth grade and graduated high school from All Saints Academy. After high school, O’Neill traveled to Tennessee to Sewanee: The University of the South before attending the University of Florida.
“It started with a really basic app,” he said. “I didn’t code then. I don’t code now. I just understood what it was like to be a freshman on a college campus or be somewhere where you don’t know people and are trying to figure out what’s going on around you.”
“Believe it or not, I was a theater major,” O’Neill smiled. Though he wasn’t involved in the theater growing up, he always had a connection to the arts. “My dad’s a sculptor, so I grew up working in and out of his shop when I was a kid,” he said.
The idea evolved, transcending college campuses into every downtown, dive bar, and community club worldwide. “I realized that people didn’t just have this problem on college campuses. It’s a problem all over – people are looking for things to do. […] There are things going on in downtowns all over the world, […] and they’re just trying to get an extra five or six people to show up. Anyone who’s been a part of a club knows we’re not all some big celebrity. We can’t turn out hundreds of thousands of people, but getting an extra five people to show up at an event can be a really big deal. So that was the focus.”
Finance was O’Neill’s first choice of study, but he found it boring. He didn’t know anything about theater and thought he’d give it a try to fulfill an art credit. O’Neill remembers his teacher talking about ‘stage left’ and ‘stage right’ during his first class. “I was the only non-theater kid in the room. I remember raising my hand and asking, ‘What do you mean?’” He would go on to build sets and work on lighting and sound.
When he first began working on the app, O’Neill admitted, “I was flying by the seat of my pants trying to figure it out as I went. I made the mistake at the time — it was a learning experience — instead of focusing on creating real value and functionality for the app that people would want to use, I focused on hype.”
Outside of Promo, the theater major turned app creator enjoys strumming the blues guitar and coaching sports. O’Neill has coached since age 19, predominantly middle and high school lacrosse and soccer at All Saints Academy. He even coached in Tennessee when he attended Sewanee. “It’s one of my favorite things. I love doing it,” he said. “Some of the seniors over at All Saints were my first team when they were in middle school. I’ve watched them grow up from being 12-year-old boys to being 18-year-old young men. They’re great kids.” This year has been a busy one for the Promo founder and CEO. Though the last year
That experience gave the Promo CEO pause to rethink the app. He came up with several key features that would benefit Promo’s users. - CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 -
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