Pocket Guru is a personalised, AI-powered fortune-telling app born from an internal five-day hackathon at Perp Labs. What started as a shared dream among three teammates turned into a fully functioning prototype in just three intense days of building.

As regular users of tarot and astrology tools, we knew exactly what was missing: traditional fortune-telling is slow, expensive, and inconvenient, while existing apps feel too generic and emotionally flat. We set out to build something we'd actually love to use—a daily spiritual companion that remembers your past interactions and offers personalised guidance through AI-powered characters like Yami (playful and quirky) and Madam Astra (wise and calming).

With only three days of development, we took strategic shortcuts: building the entire backend with n8n, using Google Sheets as our database, and deploying as a Progressive Web App instead of a native app. These scrappy choices allowed us to move extremely quickly, solving problems as they appeared and seeing tangible progress hour by hour.

Through constant iteration and asking "What can we remove to get to the core experience?", we discovered our real edge: more human-like AI characters, smarter context-aware guidance, and a tighter, more personal experience. Working in Flow Club with three brief sync-ups daily kept our momentum strong, and the clear division of responsibilities—Hana on rapid API creation, Minrey on UX design, and Miya on full-stack integration—made the intense days feel surprisingly enjoyable.

Lesson Learned

Pairing with two teammates who have completely different skillsets from me was extremely fire! I had so much fun with them and was in awe of their brilliance in their own specialities. Technically, we only had two days to build the prototype, since one day was used for discussion and role assignment. This was my first-ever vibe code hackathon. Through the experience, I am more certain that the AI workflow is inevitable, and it's a matter of your domain know-how and talents. As a product person in the team, we're now moving super quickly after this hackathon held by our company, Perp Labs.