Teenwork

The safe way to get jobs as a teen while learning how to be a good worker.

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Inspiration

After brainstorming ideas with AI, myself, and my parents, I had three ideas left:

  1. A marketplace app that uses AI to take a picture from your phone, write a description, and post it on the marketplace.
    1. An app to teach kids the basics about the US through many quick sessions.
    2. An app where people could post small jobs like yard work, and teens could apply.

Of these, I chose the third one because I had experience working jobs and knew how hard it can sometimes be to find a good employer.

What it does

My app is built to help teens find work safely while learning about jobs, so they will do better when getting jobs as adults. • It has lessons and an AI coach to teach you how to be a good worker while preparing you for adult jobs. • It has a place where employers can post jobs and teens can apply for them. These also have advanced filters and are automatically filtered by the jobs teens are legally allowed to do. It also has ratings so teens can see how much other teens liked working for an employer, and employers can see how good a teen is at working. • It has a messaging feature that blocks profane language, swearing, and requests to meet alone without parental consent. • It has a parent dashboard with controls that automatically filter the jobs your teen sees.

How we built it

I decided to use AI for coding while I decided all the features and what to change or fix in it. The reason I chose to use AI is because the app I wanted to build was more of a frontend app, and the language I knew at the time was Python, which is not very good for frontend development.

Instead, I used Claude to write the code while I chose the features and helped design the aesthetics. Other tools I used were Gemini, ChatGPT, and Browser Use. These were used more minimally for brainstorming, researching, and getting a second opinion on my app.

Challenges we ran into

Problems I ran into: • In general, Claude made a lot of bugs that I had to find and tell it to fix. • There was one bug where the sign-in buttons didn’t work, and it was really hard to get Claude to fix it. Another problem with this bug was that when Claude updated the app with a bigger change, the bug was pretty likely to reappear. • The last bigger challenge was the free quota limit on Claude. Claude’s free limit is pretty strict, which made it harder to build my app. To deal with this, I made sure to use almost my whole limit every time it reset. • Setting up the backend services. These included Supabase, EmailJS, and a few others. These were quite problematic to set up.

Overall, none of these stopped me from moving forward, but they took up a lot of time and were hard to work around.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing I’m most proud of is my final app. • I have added all the features I think it really needs and more. • I have polished it and fixed most of the little aesthetic details that I wanted to change. • I have hosted it on Netlify and indexed it with Google.

This is the first app I have had indexed on Google, which is super exciting. It’s also the most complete app I’ve made so far.

What we learned

The thing that helped me most through the process of building the app, especially when using AI, was staying patient and excited about what I was doing. Using AI can sometimes be really frustrating, so when I use it, I try to stay patient and excited about the project I’m working on. This is the biggest thing I learned while building this project.

What's next for Teenwork

Since I've indexed it on Google, it's open for the public to use. For a bit, I've thought about trying to get a lot of users and make money from the pro plan. The reason I haven't moved forward with this yet, and might not, is because the two-way market means that I have to get a lot of users for the app to be useful.The other problem is that because it will take longer to start making money, I'm very hesitant to spend money on promoting it. Last of all, it's a larger app which means if I get a bunch of paying people and something crashes, it will be harder for me to fix that bug in a timely manner. So as of now, I'm going to keep it hosted and see how it does.

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