Bolt Made me Bold... (LullaRead)

Aima Atigari — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 15:51:52 +0000

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: After the Hack.

Building LullaRead During the Bolt Hackathon

From bedtime struggles to a fully functional AI-powered storytelling app.

The Creator's Curse

There’s no end to bravery — today you build a plane, tomorrow you want to go to space.

It just goes on and on, and for ambitious minds, I think the only time it ends is when one departs this world.

There’s never a time you’ve “arrived” — at least in my own eyes. There’s always a new territory to conquer.

The Ambition

For the past ~3 months, I’ve been using AI intensively.

My goal from the beginning of the year was to use it to build — and perhaps create something valuable enough that people would fall in love with it.

My very first app built and deployed with an AI Assistant was ScribbleShow (not with Bolt though).

This was me dipping one foot in the water to understand how the whole AI Assistant ecosystem worked.

I wasn’t aware I would take a deep dive into building with an AI assistant so soon, but here I am… courtesy of the bolt.new hackathon.

The Idea

I’ve had a list of ideas piling up again recently, and LullaRead (at the time, it didn’t have a name) was one of them.

My daughter usually wants me to tell her a story before bedtime. It doesn’t matter if I’m reading from a book or saying it from my head — she just wants my company and to hear my voice before she falls asleep.

Being a remote worker, I struggled with this. I often worked right up until bedtime, leaving me just enough energy to be present — without talking much.

So the problem was: How can I be present with my daughter without speaking, and still satisfy her story request?

Along Came Bolt

I heard about the Bolt hackathon early on. I already had a Bolt subscription. I can’t remember exactly where I first saw it, but my former manager sending me the link sealed the deal.

The prizes were attractive, but more importantly, the hackathon gave me a set timeframe to build something valuable (at least to me) and see it through to the end.

A Bit About Me

I’ve been in tech for a decade — from the early days of creating amateur designs, tweaking WordPress PHP code, breaking it, and figuring out how to fix it.

Even though I’ve been at the intersection of product and growth, this experience was a whole new world for me. It was interesting enough to keep me up at night and make me feel alive.

That’s what I love about tech: it’s an ever-evolving field that keeps you on your toes.

The Challenges

What you don’t know is difficult.

Building ScribbleShow at the time was hard — but LullaRead brought a whole new level of “hard.”

For LullaRead, I had to:

Create Edge Functions to run processes in the cloud
Deal with video rendering timeouts
Consider technical and usability trade-offs
Implement secure communications

These were things I hadn’t done at this scale before. I hit several roadblocks and got frustrated — but I showed up, tried to understand, and tried again.

Errors Made Me Focus

Building can make you obsessed — borderline mad.

Whatever you do, make sure you find your way back.

There were times I got so frustrated that I skipped exercising for days, or even went 24 hours without a bath.

I reflected deeply on my life, felt depressed, but kept going because resilience always wins.

I’d try fixing something in the prompt 6+ times. If it still didn’t work, I’d close my laptop and sleep. The next morning, coffee in hand, I’d start over — focusing on logs line by line until I made sense of them.

Submissions

It’s not always what you think — sometimes it’s better, sometimes worse. Accept it, learn, and move on.

When the hackathon started, I imagined my submission in a certain way. I took photos, recorded videos, and planned smooth transitions.

But it never happened. I ended up recording my pitch 20 minutes before the deadline and submitting with just 3 minutes to spare.

Even though the project will outlive the hackathon, I would’ve felt terrible if I hadn’t submitted.

Bolt Made Me Bold

I did something daring:

I committed my runway for the rest of the year towards a cause I believe in — a solid framework for validating my ideas.

After much thought, I had two choices:

Play it safe, live day-to-day, and have enough until the end of the year
Use my runway to build a complete validation framework, test my ideas, see which are valuable, scale, and either succeed or fail completely

You know which I chose.

Doing It Afraid

You know that deafening silence when something huge happens to you? That’s how I feel — uncertain excitement and unfounded hope.

The only constant in my life is faith.

I admit I’m scared, but what is life without an adrenaline rush now and then?

We’ve all heard the phrase “Do it afraid”. I preach it, but preaching without leading doesn’t move the needle — so here I am, leading.

What’s the worst that could happen?

I learn.

And who knows? I might just succeed. But I’ll never know if I don’t try.

The Future

I’ll be unveiling LullaRead in the coming days.

Beyond LullaRead, I’m on a path to redefine myself again — unlearn, relearn, and adopt new ways of doing things to evolve into a better version of myself.

Growth is painful, but no pain, no gain.

If you are a parent with younger kids, you should try out ->LullaRead and share some feedback.

Thanks

Until next time…

Ciao

Aima

DEV Community: Aima Atigari