My journey building with Bolt during the World's Largest Hackathon

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WLH Challenge: Building with Bolt Submission

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.

What a journey this hackathon has been! But first, let me tell you about my first encounter with Bolt.

I first heard about Bolt during a Contra livestream, where the Bolt Expert Programme was announced and some experts showcased the product. It blew my mind! The idea of creating websites and applications in a fraction of the usual time was incredibly motivating.

I followed Bolt on Twitter (X) and turned on all post notifications so I wouldn’t miss any updates. I was thrilled when it was announced that everyone would get a chance to try Bolt—alongside other tools—for free, during the World's Largest Hackathon.

The Idea

As soon as I saw this, I registered for the hackathon and received the builder pack (thanks so much for this, Bolt team), and began thinking of product ideas. That's how Invoyceez came to life.

For almost a year, I’d had an idea for an invoice web app that did more than just invoices, and most importantly, was built specifically for freelancers and small businesses. This was very important to me due to my own experiences working on freelance projects and creating invoices.

I had also begun working on the application's user interface in Figma, though I had to wait for about two weeks before starting due to my schedule. Before I began working on my project, I bookmarked tweets from the Bolt team and other builders that highlighted project setups, prompting techniques and more. The builder/project highlight livestreams on Twitter were incredibly helpful and motivating.

After redeeming my Bolt coupon code, I began with a prompt to create the essential pages for the application. Within minutes, it was done—truly amazing stuff. I then started tweaking certain elements to fine-tune the landing page (more on this later). The dashboard pages were also edited, while I kept a close eye on my token usage.

There were challenges in the hackathon linked to sponsors like Supabase, RevenueCat, Expo and more. So I began adding integrations to my project, starting with Supabase. Bolt helped create schemas and tables in Supabase, based on my prompts.

I’d also like to highlight a literal lifesaver in Bolt—the discussion feature. This is a mode that allows you to chat with the platform for help or suggestions on your project, with optional actionable buttons to fix, implement, or research further. I found this tool extremely useful throughout my hackathon experience.

Bolt also introduced more tokens over the final weekend—sadly, my schedule didn’t allow me to fully take advantage of this opportunity. Bolt also distributed coupons for sponsor tools. One of these was a free domain name from IONOS. I redeemed mine and applied to purchase a domain name for my application. This was an important step, as I was keen to enter the domain name challenge. Unfortunately, I received an email from the domain provider stating they couldn’t provide the desired domain. That stung 😢

The One-Shot Mini Challenge

Towards the end of the hackathon, Bolt announced a mini challenge—the One-Shot Challenge—where participants had to create something amazing using just one prompt. This was a true challenge given the numerous ideas I had, but I eventually settled on an idea called PlayMyFeelz—an application that matches your current mood to a Spotify playlist.

The main issue was integrating the Spotify API with my application, which didn’t seem viable given the constraints of a one-prompt challenge (plus the UI). So I explored other options and decided to use a few hardcoded playlists from Spotify. I asked the good ol’ ChatGPT for some help and got a few playlist links, then crafted a prompt using a UI I had previously designed in Figma just for this challenge.

Submission Deadline

I started freaking out slightly when the deadline was a day away. I was stuck on a critical part of my project—exporting the generated invoices as an image or PDF. For some reason, the JavaScript libraries I used weren’t compatible with Bolt. I tried multiple fixes, but nothing worked 😫. To top it off, I had fewer than 1 million tokens remaining!

So I tried a different approach. I made some quick edits to the homepage and then spent most of my tokens trying to fix core issues (still no success). I also discovered that manually editing the files didn’t deduct tokens, which allowed me to keep experimenting—including temporarily breaking the invoice preview screen in the process.

With only a few hours left, I started to panic. I even considered not submitting the project at all because it was incomplete. But in the end, I decided to submit it anyway.

I learnt a lot from this hackathon and from the community. Keep an eye out for my next article, where I’ll talk more about that. Until then, thanks for reading.

Ciao 👋