This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle.
What I Built
SideHustle Studio — Your product deserves a better story.
SideHustle Studio is an AI-powered product listing writer designed for small business owners, freelancers, online sellers, and side hustlers.
Many small sellers spend too much time writing attractive product descriptions for their online shops and social media pages. Professional copywriting can be expensive, and hosted AI tools may introduce recurring costs.
SideHustle Studio aims to make this process simpler by generating an editable first draft from seller-provided product details.
Key Features
- Generate product titles and descriptions.
- Prepare listing drafts for platforms such as Instagram, Etsy, eBay, and Shopify.
- Choose English, Hindi, or Hinglish output.
- Select a writing tone and target audience.
- Include a seller-provided price.
- Copy or download the generated draft.
- Use a local AI model rather than relying on a paid hosted AI API.
The goal is to help small sellers spend less time writing listings and more time growing their businesses.
Demo
Live Website: SideHustle Studio
GitHub Repository: View the source code
Deployment note: GitHub Pages hosts the static frontend. The local AI generation feature requires the Python backend and Ollama model to be running, so it may not work on the public GitHub Pages website.
Code
The project uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend, with Python and Flask connecting the application to a local Ollama model.
Repository: https://github.com/devanshguptacu-create/SideHustleStudio.git
How I Built It
I built SideHustle Studio around a practical problem: helping independent sellers create useful product listing drafts without depending on a paid hosted AI API.
The project uses:
- HTML5 for the page structure.
- CSS3 for a responsive, nature-inspired green-and-cream interface.
- JavaScript for form interactions, loading states, copying, and downloading drafts.
- Python and Flask for the backend.
- Ollama to run the language model locally.
- Qwen 2.5 3B as the default model for local inference.
The backend sends seller-provided product information to the locally running model and returns a draft containing a title, description, key benefits, call to action, and tags.
The prompt also instructs the model not to invent product specifications, certifications, guarantees, or other unsupported claims.
The model needs to be downloaded, and the backend must be running for AI generation to work. The public GitHub Pages deployment currently serves the frontend only.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Open innovation gives developers the freedom to experiment, inspect prompts, adapt workflows, and explore different models without depending entirely on a closed AI provider.
For a small-business tool, local inference can reduce dependence on per-request API charges and allow product information to be processed on the user's own machine.
It also gives developers more control over how the system behaves and makes it easier to customize the tool for a particular business niche.
Local AI is not automatically free of every cost: users still need suitable hardware, storage, and electricity, and model licenses must be respected.
For me, the value of open-source AI is the opportunity to build useful tools that are more customizable and potentially more accessible to people starting small businesses.
My Agent Session
No public agent session is included in this submission yet.
My First User
The next step is to share the prototype with a small seller, observe how they use it, and collect honest feedback about listing quality, time saved, and the features they would find valuable.
I will update this section when I have real user feedback.
Prize Categories
Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle.
Final Thoughts
I believe AI should make it easier for people to turn their skills and ideas into real opportunities.
SideHustle Studio is a step toward making practical AI tools more accessible to small sellers, without making a paid hosted AI service a requirement for every generation.
SideHustle Studio — Small business energy. Open AI tools. ✨
Built by Devansh Gupta.
Top comments (1)
The frontend-only deployment note is helpful. For the no-invented-claims prompt, I'd use one deliberately sparse product record across English, Hindi and Hinglish: material unknown, no certification, seller price supplied. Check the title, benefits and tags too, not only the description; "organic" or a guarantee in a hashtag is still a claim the seller didn't provide. Does the draft flag missing facts for review, and does that warning survive copy/download? Keeping the source facts beside the draft would make that first seller test easier to judge.