Today was all about alignment, validation, and foundation.
🧠Ideation & Decision-Making
We kicked things off with a long Google Meets call — bouncing ideas back and forth, debating what's worth building, and asking ourselves what could become a real business after this hackathon. We had a ton of concepts, but ultimately, one idea stood out:
Story Hero — an AI-powered storytelling app that helps parents generate personalized, calming, and educational stories for their kids.
With our vision locked in, Daniel got to work setting up everything we need: accounts for Bolt.new, GitHub, Figma, DEV, and more. No code written yet, but now we’ve got the rails laid to move fast.
🧪 Technical Prototyping & Image Generation R&D
Meanwhile, Josh dove into technical exploration. To test our vision, he spun up a quick Node script and evaluated multiple image generation APIs — Stable Diffusion, Gemini, Leonardo, DALL·E 3, and more.
The key problem: art style consistency across story pages — something most tools struggle with.
Eventually, we found a promising lead: Image Gen 1, which allows for coherent visuals using a single reference image. The trick? Frame the image generation as a conversation with the AI, using the title to maintain consistent context and style — even while processing multiple pages in parallel.
We also added concurrency and batching to keep generation fast without sacrificing consistency.
🎨 Design Exploration
On the UX side, we researched bedtime-focused UI/UX design. Since our app is meant for wind-down moments with kids, we decided on a calming dark theme inspired by dreamy, sleepy-time palettes from Dribbble. With help from ChatGPT, we rapidly iterated on ideas and built out initial views in Figma.
We're just getting started — but the vision is clear. This isn't just a hackathon app. We're here to build something real. Story Hero is about reclaiming screen time for creativity, imagination, and connection.
More tomorrow.
✨ Let’s make bedtime magical again.
— Josh & Daniel
storyhero.com (coming soon)
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