Jim Cook

The photography business came first. Cook and his wife, Melissa, started it together in 2006, but holding down a job at IBM while also developing software for the photography industry was too much work for one man. In 2012, his son Michael replaced him in the business. Michael and the business migrated into pageants, and Cook came along to the weekends as a spectator. Melissa passed away from cancer in 2020. Michael runs the business now, as a pageant photographer.

That is how a longtime developer ended up roughly ten years deep in pageantry, and four years into building software for it. What struck him in those early ballrooms was the paper. "Building software for a pageant just seemed natural to me," he says — watching how pageants worked, and holding the general thought that a complete pageant system should be built, and should be affordable.

Affordable turned out to mean something specific. Bombyhead, the scoring system, is free for pageant night. The only thing Cook charges for is People's Choice.

He is careful about that distinction. Asked which of his tools helps a pageant thrive, he first named Dempsi, then corrected himself: People's Choice is the answer, not any one product. Dempsi is built around it. Bombyhead offers it as an option. The money runs to the pageant's charity and to the pageant itself. It is the work he is proudest of, because in his experience it generates significantly more income than other methods — and that margin can be what separates a thriving pageant from a failing one. One director recently used it to benefit a local animal shelter; the write-up is coming.

On the weekend itself, the thing that matters most is quieter. Bombyhead runs an automated tally with an audit feature built in, and sends score sheets out promptly rather than leaving families to wait weeks. Cook is blunt about why that matters. Complaints, in his experience, arrive as posts and pointed comments online — a parent convinced a daughter was cheated. The software is meant to give contestants peace of mind and to give a director who did nothing wrong something to stand on. Fast, auditable results head off a fair number of accusations before they start.

I have seen directors work tirelessly, and anything I can develop to make their life easier and to help them thrive, I do.

The toolkit grew as he explored the industry and found the gaps: Pageant Alert, Pageant Interview Coach, Pageant Photo Coach, Ad Maker, Pageant Pro Network. The most recent addition is not a tool at all. Cook writes articles for the industry and has started a Pageant Research Lab, which publishes findings and reports drawn from data he collects.

Finding industry data to understand and help the industry down to the transaction level was non-existent.

It is a family operation. Cook does most of the development from Georgetown, Kentucky; his sons Michael and Robbie handle support and the work that is not code. As for who gets the most out of any of it, he has a short answer: the directors who embrace the tools are the ones who can make them sing.