Inspiration

Almost four years ago, I was running a B2B digital-marketing agency where most of my clients were crypto-based businesses. We were generating more than $100 K in annual revenue. Then the crypto crash hit and almost drove me bankrupt; I had to let go of my entire team.

While searching for a way back, I discovered the OpenAI Playground and began experimenting with the earliest GPT models. I wrote SEO-optimised articles at scale, sold them, and slowly got back on track with a much smaller crew.

During that same period, my mom contracted COVID-19 and her health deteriorated quickly. In her final days she told me:

“Son, you’re helping big companies with lots of money make more money. Don’t you think, with the skills you have, you should also be looking out for the middle class so that you’ll never face the problem of customer concentration? The middle class is the majority of the world.”

That statement stuck with me. After she passed away, I resolved to bring her dream to life.

I founded Freedom With AI, helping professionals upskill in AI and become irreplaceable in the new era. Within two years, I built a community of more than 2M people—one of the world’s largest AI communities—and generated over $2M in revenue.

Still, I felt my impact on the middle class was only surface-level. I wanted AI up-skilling to be as addictive as social media yet create real depth of knowledge.

So I asked myself, What if people could keep their scrolling habit but, instead of watching brainrot content, they would be up-skilling and becoming irreplaceable? I pitched the idea to my co-founder Animesh, a brilliant tech guy. He loved it and said we could let’s vibe-code the whole thing. While brainstorming, he suggested we join this Bolt Hackathon, which had just started ten days earlier—it felt like the perfect launch pad. It’s basically Duolingo for AI up-skilling.

We decided to set sail and make it happen!

Our Promise

If you spend 15–30 minutes on AI Shorts every day, you will master AI in such depth that you’ll become irreplaceable within a few months.

What the Project Does

1. Swipe & Learn – A TikTok-style feed of 60-second clips; instead of brainrot you’re getting unparalleled AI knowledge.
2. Gamification like Duolingo – Daily XP, streak bonuses, and public leaderboards keep learners coming back.
3. Second-Brain Graph – Every watched clip is vector-indexed and displayed in an Obsidian-like knowledge map.
4. Contextual Chat – An in-app AI tutor answers questions based on each user’s personal graph and also shares exact video references for a reinforced learning experience.

How We Built It

• Discovered Bolt.New months ago and have vibe-coded several tools for different use cases. For AI Shorts, Bolt acts as the main base—our coding partner.
• Expo + React Native: we’re ready to go live on iOS.
• Supabase holds videos, user data, and the vector database.
• PlayFab runs our XP economy and leaderboards.
• OpenAI GPT-4o + embeddings drive semantic video search and graph-aware chat.
• The Obsidian-style graph is rendered via react-force-graph for a silky mobile experience.

Challenges I Faced

1. Ultra-smooth scrolling feed – Achieving a feed as smooth as Instagram/TikTok took a lot of back-and-forth.
2. Balanced gamification – Tuning PlayFab’s XP curve so users feel rewarded, not exploited.
3. Vector graph performance – Streaming embeddings without freezing the UI and making the graph interactive in real time.
4. Fine-tuning ChatGPT – Getting the video reference and vector-database embedding right was difficult, but once we nailed it, the results felt like magic!

Without Bolt’s vibe-coding approach I’d have needed a full-stack team; instead, two founders shipped a working prototype.

What I Learned

• Removing friction matters more than adding features—people learn when it feels like play.
• A visual knowledge graph triples re-watch rates; users love seeing how ideas connect.
• Vibe-coding with Bolt lets us focus on pedagogy and UX instead of plumbing.

If I can redirect even a sliver of daily scrolling toward AI mastery, millions of middle-class learners will future-proof their careers—and I’ll be honoring my mother’s wish in the process.

🏆 Contending for Bonus Awards

• Inspirational Story — From near-bankruptcy and my mother’s final wish to a 2 M-member AI community, proving adversity can spark massive impact.
• Creative Use of AI — A vector “Second-Brain” graph plus GPT-4o chat turns every swipe into a personalized micro-lesson.
• Future Unicorn — Billion-user market and early traction position AI Shorts for hyper-growth at venture scale.
• Sharpest Problem Fit — Solves “no time to learn AI” by piggybacking on the scrolling habit people already have.
• We Didn’t Know We Needed This — Reimagines doom-scrolling as career-building; once tried, it feels instantly obvious.
• Most Likely to Get Funded — Sticky daily engagement and clear freemium + B2B revenue paths make a compelling VC case.

IMPORTANT

As our App was primarily built for the iOS platform, we applied for the Apple Developer Program, unfortunately Apple haven’t got back yet, so. we couldn’t publish it to the app store.

That’s why we request you to use the Expo Go App on an iPhone to test our application, using the bolt project link we are providing. Along with that we are also giving a Stackblitz project link in case that works for your review.

We are currently using content available on the internet to showcase the prototype, we have plans to create our own content on AI and also generate content using models like Veo3 in the production build.

Thanks!

Built With

• bolt
• expo.io
• openai
• playfab
• react
• react-native
• supabase
• typescript