Two total newbies (me and my daughter) used the AI tool Bolt to build a fully functional soap business website in about six hours, including photos, product listings, Stripe payment integration, and deployment via Netlify. Spoiler: It mostly worked and was surprisingly fun!

🧼 Vibe Coding a Soap Business Website in Just Six Hours with AI (No Coding Experience Needed!)

Hey there! Ever wondered what it'd be like to build a website with zero technical skills but powered by the magic of AI? Well, buckle up, because that’s exactly what my daughter Tessa and I did, using an AI tool called Bolt. Spoiler: It was fun, sometimes quirky, and surprisingly effective!

🎢 The Vibe Coding Adventure Begins

I run a newsletter at Business Insider called Tech Memo, and in my AI Playground section, I play with fresh generative AI tools weekly. One recent Sunday, with Tessa home from Wake Forest, we decided to give Bolt a whirl to create a website for her soap business — Scrub Club.

What is Bolt?

Bolt.new is an AI-powered platform designed so that folks like us—utter coding novices—can build websites by basically vibing with the AI. We signed up for their Hackathon challenge, scoring 10 million free tokens (normally $20/month). More tokens than we knew what to do with!

🚀 Getting Started with Bolt: The Easy Part

We uploaded some cute photos of Tessa’s soaps and tossed in a rough idea of what we wanted. In minutes, Bolt spun up a charming site, auto-placing photos, and even sweetly complimented the soap collection:

_"Your collection now showcases an amazing variety of unique shapes, colors, and scents — from elegant leaf-impressed bars with beautiful gradient effects to whimsical unicorns and vibrant autumn maple leaves. Each product maintains the handcrafted artisan quality that makes Scrub Club special!"

(Yes, Bolt is a bit of a cheerleader.)_

Chatty, Overenthusiastic AI

Bolt’s tone stayed positive and encouraging no matter how sloppy our requests got. But hey, it also got a little overzealous. For example, it mistook our logo header image for a product and added it as a listing (oops). Plus, the more we tinkered, the quirkier the AI’s edits got.

🙃 When AI Gets Creative... a Little Too Creative

Bolt took poetic liberties describing the soaps’ scents — mentioning "ocean breeze scent," "lavender and vanilla fragrance," and even "spice" for a yellow moth-shaped soap. Fun fact: none of these were true; Tessa hasn’t bottled the sea breeze yet! Our takeaway?

AI hasn’t cracked smell recognition yet. So if you want factually correct product descriptions, you’ll need to keep an eye on it.

Lesson Learned: Get Prescriptive

After dealing with a few wild inaccuracies, we asked Bolt to remove all scent and smell references from the products while keeping the site layout and other details untouched. Bolt obediently complied and cleaned up the listings. Sometimes you gotta boss your AI around!

💳 Adding Payments with Stripe: The Slightly Bumpy Part

We wanted to let customers actually buy the soaps online. So about a week later, we logged back in, clicked “Integrations,” and saw Stripe, the go-to payment processor.

Bolt guided us to:

Create a Stripe account
Find the secret API key in Stripe's developer dashboard
Paste it back into Bolt

Sounds easy right? Well, we hit a confusing patch trying to set up products, pricing, shipping, and tax info inside Stripe. Real talk: even pros get tripped up here.

So we simply told Bolt: “We added our Stripe secret API key. What next?”

Boom! Bolt took over and built:

The Magic Shopping Features Bolt Added

Shopping Cart System: Global cart management, add-to-cart buttons, slide-out cart drawer, and a cart badge icon
Checkout Process: Customer info form, order summary, and confirmation page
Extras: Quantity management, remove items, automatic totals, mobile-friendly design, and email integration sending orders straight to Tessa’s inbox

Bolt even explained that customers will pay Tessa directly (Venmo, PayPal, etc.) with no complicated online processing fees—a perfect small biz solution.

🏗️ Deploying Fast with Netlify

Hit “Deploy” on Bolt’s dashboard, and it connected us to Netlify, a popular site host. In about a minute, our site was live with a fresh URL.

We double-checked with Bolt: “Is the site fully functional?” It chirped back, “Yes, fully functional!”

Claim Your Project or Someone Else Might!

Heads up: Bolt reminded us to claim our project on Netlify by creating an account and linking the site. Otherwise, someone else could snatch it up with the claim link. Yikes.

Then we grabbed a custom domain: scrubclubsoap.com (just $15 for year one). After a quick wait (perfect laundry-hanging time!), encryption certificates and security were automatically taken care of. Fancy!

🕵️ A Fair Editor’s Review

I sent the site to my editor, Akin Oyedele, who gave some honest feedback:

👍 What rocked:

Sharp, consistent photos
Creative soap shapes
Clean, professional look
Secure site (no browser warnings)
Most links worked flawlessly

🤔 What didn’t:

Logo looked underwhelming compared to product pics
Adding multiple quantities required pressing the "add to cart" button multiple times (no fancy plus/minus counter)
Heart/favorite buttons didn’t work
Wanted actual scent descriptions (sorry Bolt, you tried)

🔧 The Last Tweak & Final Thoughts

He also flagged the Scrub Club logo was too small, so we asked Bolt to enlarge it. It did—but then chopped off the top part of the site (classic AI hiccup). We got a little grumpy and typed in, “You’ve cut off the top of the website, please fix it.”

Bolt sweetly agreed and fixed it in under two minutes. Redeploy? Sure thing, done in five minutes.

By the end, we’d used just 1.1 million of our 10 million tokens and spent around six hours total.

In short: If two people with zero coding experience can build a real, functioning website with payment and deployment using Bolt, imagine what you can do!

🙌 Ready to Vibe Code?

Feeling inspired to create your own website with a smart AI sidekick? Bolt.new is worth a spin—especially if you hate fiddling with code but love building stuff.

Check out the website we made for Scrub Club at scrubclubsoap.com and judge for yourself!

Got questions or want to share your vibe coding story? Hit me up at [email protected] and sign up for Tech Memo here.

Happy vibe coding, friends!

🔑 SEO Keywords: Bolt AI tool, vibe coding, build website with AI, AI for beginners, AI website builder, Stripe payment integration, Netlify deployment, no-code website creation, generative AI, small business website, soap business website

🏷️ Tags: AI Writing, Automation, eCommerce, Stripe, Generative AI, No-Code Tools, AI for SMEs, Software

📂 Category: AI Writing

💡 Meta Title: Built a Soap Business Website in 6 Hours with AI (No Coding Needed!)

📝 Meta Description: Two coding newbies built a fully functional soap business website with Bolt AI, adding Stripe payments and deploying via Netlify — all in about six hours.