I discovered Bolt during a month when I needed something to keep me occupied.

I had just left Cape Town, South Africa, and moved back to my hometown, Johannesburg. I had spent some time in Cape Town trying to pursue a course that was supposed to give me a head-start in the corporate world. The program, however, turned out to be a scam, a common story in Africa.

Then, I saw a LinkedIn post from a friend titled 'Startups to look out for in 2025', and Bolt was on the list. I then saw the Bolt logo for the second time while watching the Google I/O 2025 Keynote Address. I knew there was something significant about Bolt! 😮‍💨 I quickly Googled "Bolt" and found bolt.new 🗲

My very first prompt was to create an information chatbot for a physical product I had developed. I think the Bolt AI-Assistant processed the request for about 9 seconds and then executed the prompt. I was blown away 🤯❗

I began experimenting, and every day when I logged on, I saw the call to 'Join the World's Largest Hackathon'. I obviously ignored this for some time, convinced I couldn't participate in a hackathon.

Following an email invitation to join the hackathon, I decided to give it a read. I signed up just before it started and immediately began searching on Devpost for a teammate with more experience than me.

Someone reached out, but then abandoned me in the first week of the hackathon 😔. I then asked someone I knew to join my team, but he was too busy. At that point, I did a 180 and changed my original concept. I decided to develop something simpler, with many practical use cases: a form builder.

Forms are something people use every day, and nearly every business depends on them for most activities. My cousin was restructuring his business, and my goal was to get his input so I could develop something he genuinely needed. That way, I'd know my product would be useful beyond the hackathon.

I waited two weeks before he was available to meet. When I arrived, he had a printed form on his desk. This, it turned out, was his business's main pain point: a consent form. Getting this document signed was paramount to his operations.

"That's all?"

I thought. At this point, I had already developed the core form builder. I only needed to ensure the user could customize the form to suit their business needs, I figured.

However, before leaving, he mentioned that he needs information verified due to an impersonation case he had dealt with in the past. That's when I realized I would need to implement real security measures to prevent identity fraud (another common issue in South Africa).

Although four weeks seemed like a long time, especially with bolt.new capable of generating code in a matter of seconds, the deadline didn't seem enough given all the unexpected life events that can happen in a month.

Even though I wasn't full-time employed, I had tasks to complete for a freelance project. I taught my dad to use bolt and encouraged him to start a project. I ran out of memory. I wasted too much time searching for a teammate, and in the last week, I took my mom to the hospital where she spent a few days.

I also spent an incredible amount of time designing my hero-image! This was my personal procrastination hiccup 😊. Check out my landing page for ◇ otokia ←. I spent a lot of tokens on a sun animation which dissappeared into the gray sky background ⛅.

The local Bolt community was a very encouraging group. I joined the Cape Town, South Africa Discord server, bolt.army ⚡ and the Johannesburg, South Africa virtual IRL events. The Johannesburg community (Now Bolt ZA) has been and is still quite active.

The Bolt ZA group, started by Servaas, was supportive. We helped relay information right until the last minute, I submitted 2 hours before the deadline, one of our members, Sugan, submitted his project just 2 minutes before the deadline! Servaas submitted just within the deadline extension, after he had nearly given up.

The bolt.army ⚡ is a great international group! And locally, we continue to support each other, with Vijal (an experienced software developer) starting a subreddit for vibe coding help to assist with technical questions. I also used one of William's submissions: helpful dev tools to write this post in Markdown ✨