Capsol

Home to Capsol
4am coconut water hydration
Mascot hunting
Write your stories
Add images and audio

We’re Capsol, a four-founder hackathon team brought together by a shared obsession with preserving stories. Three of us are seasoned developers with Jack as the full-stack ninja, Lucas the backend whisperer, Leo the front-end philosopher and Jamie to keep us human (and showered).

Inspiration

Grandparents once leafed through carefully labeled photo albums. Today your memories are scattered across 48 000 unnamed screenshots and filtered social posts. We wanted to surface the real stories (the voices, the laughter, the wisdom) before they slip away.

How We Built It

Concept to Whiteboard June 20: Marker in hand, four people debating until we hit something. We ordered Burger King and a coconut water to get to 4am.

June 21: We hit “lost stories.” Leo and Lucas previously won a hackathon, shipping a generative AI podcasting platform, so we decided to take that to the next level with storytelling.

Core Features
- Upload photos, voice notes or videos
- Enter a prompt
- Receive an AI-narrated podcast, a short video and an interactive chat character
Tech Stack

AI: Gemini, Sonnet 4, ChatGPT-4o-mini, Autogen, Bolt (our secret sauce) Frontend: React, Next.js, Expo, Bun Backend: Express.js Hosting: Railway, Netlify

The Journey

We built the first prototype in 4 hours and booked a demo for June 25 with a very large client in Sydney.
Classic hackathon moment: a show-stopping bug minutes before the TestFlight demo. Lucas raced in, applied a fix and deployed just in time.
We high-fived like it was a road trip and then crushed the client meeting (tears optional).
In the days that followed, we polished the UI, launched the landing page and celebrated Leo’s impromptu piano gig at a Medieval bar.

Challenges Faced

Data chaos: Standardizing dozens of file formats without losing metadata Real-time generation: Balancing speed and audio/video quality under tight time pressure Team sync: Coordinating four founders each focused on their own startup into a shared vision

What We Learned

Rapid prototyping thrives on clear whiteboard sketches and potent coffee. AI pipelines can bend under load; optimizing model calls matters as much as model choice. Great products emerge when you mix playful creativity with disciplined debugging - especially when most of the code is written by AI.

Conclusion

Capsol is more than an app. It’s a time machine with killer UI. It’s a tribute to the stories we almost lose and the voices we almost forget. We built it in a few caffeine-fueled days and we’re just getting started.