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New Feature Showdown · Recap
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We Let Our Customers Pick What We Build Next. Here's How It Went.
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Inside the first USLege New Feature Showdown — brisket, ballots, and three teams reinventing legislative intelligence.
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The USLege founders on stage at the New Feature Showdown.
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On Thursday, July 2, we filled the Texas Public Policy Foundation auditorium in Austin, Texas, served the famous Franklin BBQ until every tray was empty, and handed a big decision to the people in the seats. Three teams. Three brand-new features. One hackathon winner chosen by a live audience vote!
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Wait — what's a hackathon?
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We got that question a lot. Fair one. It's a mashup of "hack" (build-it-fast programming) and "marathon," coined back in 1999 to describe small teams racing the clock to ship working software. It's a staple at modern software companies.
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For years, the software built for this field stayed pretty much the same while the amount of legislation and the workload boomed. Legacy platforms became too slow for real-time action and weren't working with the clients they served. Nobody invited the people who live in these platforms into the room where the roadmap gets decided. We're changing that.
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A full house — every seat taken.
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Team 1 Texan Roots
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James Herring Jr · Rachel Molloy · Mircea Burac · Baker Weil
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They rolled in Texan style: hats, jeans, boots. Their pitch matched the swagger. A bill's story never stays inside the Capitol — it plays out on X, gets picked up by the press, and shapes client calls by Monday. Texan Roots pulls social sentiment, news coverage, legislator X feeds, and media radar into one view, so you see what legislators are posting and which way the narrative is trending without leaving USLege. The kind of ambient awareness that used to take a whole team.
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Team 2 The Watch presents Watchtower
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Jess McDonald · Luke Markey · Ben Molloy · Paul Wirries
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The team opened with a new intern dropped into a nightmare of Government Affairs Jeopardy — which then revealed Watchtower: one screen that answers the three questions you actually ask about a bill.
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Have we seen this fight before? Finds ancestors and cross-state look-alikes.
How will each member vote? Predicts the House and Senate floor, member by member, with a confidence level.
Who's for it and who's against it? Rolls witnesses up into a clean for-vs-against by organization.
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That way anyone, at any level, has all the bill intelligence they need in one place.
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Team 3 License to Bill
Winner
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Koosh Ghaziani · Riah Fuesler · Michael Kelleher · Nick Sercel
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The Bond-themed crew took home the audience vote with the biggest swing of the day: a full reimagining of USLege as an assistant-native platform. License to Bill gives more AI access to the whole system.
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Workflows are automated jobs that run on any schedule, take open-ended instructions, and produce open-ended output — drawing on USLege's legislative data plus outside sources like news coverage.
Workspaces are reusable bundles of files and context you can attach to any chat or workflow to shape what the assistant knows and how it responds.
Integrations connect Google Calendar, Drive, Outlook, SMS and more, so the assistant can drop a hearing on your calendar or pull a file from Drive into a workspace without you leaving the conversation.
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Under the hood, the assistant taps the app's full system access and can even navigate pages on your behalf. The room saw where this is headed — and voted accordingly.
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The part that made it a success: our community
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The BBQ didn't survive. Neither did the banana pudding — every spoonful, gone. And when the winner was announced, nobody left. People stuck around to meet the teams and talk about what they'd just watched get built in front of them. That's the whole idea: put the roadmap in the room, and let our customers decide.
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*Dessert by Quiz Cakes
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See the full photo gallery from the day →
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The team behind it
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The USLege team.
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Carter Hesterman · Jess McDonald · Laura Davis · Ben Brewer · Eric Davis
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Thank you for building this with us
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To everyone who showed up, ate well, and voted — thank you. You didn't just watch a demo; you helped decide what we build next. That's exactly how we want to work.
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USLege, Inc. · Austin, TX · uslege.ai
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