Hustl

Find people for work
Homepage
Post a job

Inspiration

Students already hire each other for photography, DJing, and similar work. Finding someone usually means an Instagram post or a friend of a friend. We wanted that search to be easier, and we wanted to trust the person on the other side. We are students too, so a marketplace that only lets students in felt like the right shape for it.

What it does

Hustl is where UW students list a service and where other students find them, mostly for arts work. Sellers publish what they offer. Buyers search and post what they need. From there the two of them can take on a job, mark it done, and leave a review. You sign in with a @uw.edu address.

How we built it

The app is Next.js and React, written in TypeScript, with Tailwind on the interface. Data lives in PostgreSQL, through Prisma. We host it on a Vultr machine and use Coolify there, so pushing to the GitHub repo automatically deploys the site via a webhook

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was deciding what to build. We had to find an idea people actually wanted, and that meant talking to judges and mentors and changing direction before we wrote much code. Setting up all the infrastructure also took a little bit of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy with the product we have built and definitely look to expand upon it. We are especially proud of starting up our own server: Coolify running on Vultr, with the app and the database on that box.

What we learned

The conversations at the start are what make a project worth building. Talking with judges and mentors gave us an idea we could actually build upon. If we don't have actual user validation at the start, we would never be able to build a truly impactful product.