Ask Ron – Your Craft Buddy

Ron, your craft buddy!
Ron can design anything that comes to your mind
Import images to enhance your designs
Apply it to orderable goods
Ask Ron to apply the same to more products

Inspiration

For months, I dreamt of a platform where anyone—regardless of technical skills—could customize products just by chatting. The Bolt Hackathon was the perfect push to finally bring this vision to life. I wanted to break the complexity barrier and let creativity flow, making custom design truly accessible.

What it does

Ask Ron is a conversational web platform that lets users:

Express their needs and ideas through chat
Instantly generate visuals with AI
Apply designs to a variety of products (mugs, t-shirts, even 3D objects)
Preview, edit, and order—all in a single, chat-driven interface

It’s like having a craft buddy that helps you design, customize, and shop—no expertise required.

How we built it

We developed Ask Ron as a modular web application in just four weeks:

Frontend: React/Next.js 14 with a persistent chat UI, TypeScript strict with Zod, Tailwind CSS
AI Integration: OpenAI GPT for conversational flow, gpt-image-1 for designgeneration, using streaming for both
Backend: Supabase for authentication, storage, and order management; Pinecone for semantic search
Orchestration: Custom state machines and function calling to manage flows and services
Payments: Stripe for seamless checkout and quota management

All services are independent modules, allowing for rapid prototyping and future scalability.

Challenges we ran into

Time pressure: Shipping a full MVP in four weeks, integrating chat, AI, and multi-supplier flows was a real marathon!
Multi-modal UX: Balancing a chat-first experience with complex actions like image generation, product selection and cart management
Cost control: Managing AI/API usage and quotas without blocking real users
Supplier diversity: Standardizing product data and render previews across very different APIs
Checkout integration: Did not succeed to deliver a 100% trustable solution within the time given, so I prefered to deactivate checkout for the time being
Coding with AI: Ultra powerfull, but very risky too! Many times existing parts of the code were completely broken after implementing another functionality. Mess can be created if you don't guide the AI very carefully

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a real, functional prototype in just one month, from scratch
Achieved a true “chat-to-cart” user flow for product customization
Modular architecture—ready to plug in more suppliers and new product types
Created an experience that’s fun, accessible, and surprisingly powerful - If you try it there are high chances that you want to buy at the end of the process (happened with all my testers ☺️)

What we learned

A chat interface can make even advanced design tools friendly for everyone
Orchestrating multiple AI models and APIs is challenging, but worth it for user delight
Fast iteration and modular design are key for hackathon-scale projects
Good UX is not just about looks, but also about reducing user friction at every step