Did you hear about that Velociraptor Mimicry Competition last weekend, that was being held by Susan’s Salad Creations? That sucks – it was actually really fun, and I won; you should’ve seen my awesome costume, heard the authenticity of my raptor calls, and felt my post-raptor lunch food, baby. It’s really not your fault, though; Susan’s really didn’t have much marketing on it – I only managed to hear about it through a friend of a friend’s great aunt’s dog’s girlfriend’s owner. The truth is that many small and local businesses simply don’t have the resources to effectively promote their events, which particularly sucks when the success or failure of an event could have an effect on a business’ bottom line.

Kansas City-based Hoopla.io is a company that is connecting local businesses with publishers to help promote their events. The company has created an events management and syndication platform that enables these businesses to list events, supplying publishers with high-quality, hyperlocal events.

Event marketing shouldn’t be complicated. This is especially true for local businesses – they simply don’t have the additional resources (in the form of time, money, or expertise) to promote any events that they may be organizing. On the other side of spectrum, publishers struggle to provide relevant local events to their respective audiences. Focused on content distribution, Hoopla.io aims to solve both sides of this problem.

Hoopla.io removes the unnecessary and tedious work that’s required for local businesses in order to get the word on the street about their events; specifically, Hoopla.io hopes to take away the repetitive task of having to contact individual media outlets for such events to be listed. Through the platform, a local business (such as a music venue, art gallery, or what have you) can simply create a profile and easily add their events for syndication – there’s no need to contact publications one by one.

From there, the Hoopla.io platform gives publishers free access to all of the events that are listed, which they can – in turn – publicize through their respective media. There’s no more need for publications to curate local events on their own; rather, they can simply pull the event content directly from Hoopla.io. Through the company’s affiliate-based revenue program, publishers are encouraged to constantly use Hoopla.io, as well as encourage more local businesses to publicize their events through the platform.

The idea behind the company has clearly been doing well. At the end of October, Hoopla.io won the Miller Lite Tap the Future Semi-Finals in Dallas and was awarded with a $20k grant. This week, they’ll compete at the Finals competition for a chance to win $250k.

Hoopla.io was most recently featured at Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer Startup Showcase, where it was both the “Reader’s Choice” and “Best Pitch” for hottest showcasing startup.