OMG Career

Helping young people explore career options, develop their strengths, set and reach their goals.

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Inspiration

When I was growing up, I had no idea what I was good at or what I could possibly do in the world. I instead focused on things I was bad at (accounting, programming) instead of figuring out what I was amazing at (people skills, conversation, creative problem solving) and focusing on that.

4 million high school students graduate each year in the US and I assume the vast majority are exactly like I was. Tons of potential, just in need of better personal understanding and opportunities to explore more optionality in the world.

I wanted to build something to help others begin that path of exploration sooner and inspire them to set and achieve their goals.

What it does

The initial feature is an LLM powered career quiz that returns to the user personalized and diverse career options and strengths, along with information about how to begin pursuing those careers or further developing those skills.

I'm also layering in in a goal setting and accountability feature to help young people think about their future, set near and long term goals, and make regular updates to track progress over time.

How we built it

I used bolt.net to create a react native mobile app experience. I exported to Cursor in order to try and ship an app to the Apple Store (first submission was reje

I'm using Supabase for processing edge functions to call the OpenAI LLM, the ElevenLabs conversational ai agent, and Twilio for auth.

I'm just sales guy I have no idea what I'm doing and I cannot believe how much I've been able to accomplish so far.

Challenges we ran into

None of the other vibe coding tools (lovable, v0, rork) matched my design aesthetic well enough or weren't suitable for building mobile apps.

bolt.new broke at one point and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I hired an upwork dev, paid for 20 hours, they wasted my time and worked on features I didn't ask for.

Fortunately I ended up backtracking in the app development and using Chrome and was able to get back on track.

But there are so many setbacks. Some are challenging. It took me 18 builds before being successful shipping to the App Store. I'm doing this by myself (well, me and some LLM help), its scary, its frustrating, but I'm seeing progress and I manage to overcome every obstacle I've faced so far.

API docs are not easy for a non technical person to understand. But what I do understand? LLM prompting. A combination of using openai directly & bolt's agent has unblocked so many roadblocks I've lost count.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a life long sales person, I'm so thrilled to have been able to speak my thoughts into existence (using Whisper) and watch bolt create the product I want to build. Design, user journey, wiring up the backend, its doing everything.

The career quiz works. It provides tons of value (and hopefully inspiration) for free. I'm confident that hundreds of thousands of kids year year would benefit from it. There are 4M high school grads each year, so reaching 1M per year with a free and valuable resource isn't insane to think about.

I'll personally be ecstatic once 100,000 high school students take my career quiz. Nothing would delight me more.

What we learned

Mobile app development is insanely hard to do on your own, and vibe coding tools like bolt are a phenomenal way to build and iterate on an MVP to help make your dreams a reality. I never could have built so much without bolt.

The last dev shop I worked with charged me $150 per hour for design and dev. I assumed using bolt.new has saved me ~$20,000 already.

I learned that wireframing isn't enough. You have to build, think through the user flow, think through feature development, and communicate clearly enough to ensure that bolt understand your needs and can address them.

Clear communication is so vitally important to ensure you get back the right change requests.

What's next for OMG Career

Launch in the Apple Store, partner with private companies for support and distribution, tell my story on TikTok/Instagram, find influencers willing to partner with me, and do my best to reach 10% of the graduating high school class in the next calendar year (thats roughly 400,000 students).

This is my full time endeavor and I'm going to do whatever it takes to help young people make tangible improvement's to their lives.

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