Pearl

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  Homepage

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  Hostel listings

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  Hostel detail

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  Chatbot

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  Chatbot Search result

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  Map view

Inspiration

Recently read on Ideabrowser: 84% of solo female travelers report feeling unsafe during their trips, yet they have no reliable way to get basic safety answers.

Reminded me of all the hours I'd spend trawling through Hostelworld, browsing female-only dorms, scouring the reviews and images. Cancelling AirBnb's after one night because there was a sketchy guest in the other room.

I love solo travel, I want to make it easier and more accessible for others too.

What it does

Pinterest meets chatbot meets Airbnb — user generated visual content with verified accommodation (for now) and activities that are safe and fun for solo-female travelers.

Key features include

• Pinterest layout for hostels
• Map layout for hostels
• Chatbot for search
• Database for hostels and sign up form
• Video embedded media

How we built it

Bolt for app Supabase for sign up and hostel listings Flora for video creation from stills Figma for design

Challenges we ran into

I have to say the hardest part was working with Bolt. I spent 10 hours getting what I wanted, then with one simple change, like fixing the url of my page, my entire page had been redesigned, with different look and feel, even different content. I realised after the fact there's ways to exclude parts or focus my effort — I think the documentation and tutorials are really helpful, would be great for those to be actually a part of the web app itself e.g. when i click on revert, let me know there's actually a backup library in settings

Not enough credits — ran out on Claude, OpenAI and Flora. Ended up changing my chatbot to a non OpenAI one.

Not knowing anything and starting from scratch, not efficiently prompting

Random hallucinations and code deletions from Bolt

Prompt fatigue - after 10 hours, I found myself getting really frustrated with Bolt misunderstanding my instructions, hallucinating extra components, and putting in random changes/errors I didn't ask for. I'd then have to reprompt

Hard things were simple, simple things were hard. Trying to get margins and padding right was harder than say, setting up a chatbot from scratch. I wasted precious time trying to align typography when i should have been prompting features

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting something real out into the world from 0 Solo builder, no technical code background

What we learned

ALOT! Prompt coding, databases, data scraping and how impossible it is, how to use AI to learn what I don't know

What's next for Pearl

Keep going, reach out to travellers for content

Built With

• bolt
• supabase