Most of the Hustlers on Rahul Renaaud’s app are kids he goes to school with. They offer services like lawn mowing, snow removal, and tutoring. They’re listed right there on the platform he built, alongside their skills, their portfolios, and their availability, ready to be hired.
Rahul is a sophomore in Fishers, Indiana, just outside Indianapolis. And Hustle & Hub, the app he designed, coded, and launched on his own over the past 10 weeks this winter, is already processing real jobs for real money in his community.
The idea behind it is one of those things that sounds obvious once someone says it out loud. Students in Rahul’s orbit were already running small businesses. Lawn care, mostly. But they had no good way to find customers beyond word of mouth, and they were up against established companies with years of reputation behind them. Meanwhile, people in the neighborhood needed quick, affordable help with everyday tasks and had no easy way to find the teenager three streets over who’d happily do it for a fair price.
So Rahul built the bridge.
On Hustle & Hub, clients post a job. Students, or “Hustlers” as the app calls them, submit bids. The client picks who to hire based on price, ratings, and experience. There’s in-app messaging, an AI feature that helps clients write cleaner job descriptions, and a freemium pricing model. Three service requests are free. After that, clients can pay $5 per request or $10 a month for unlimited access. Hustlers who want to be featured as top providers in their category can subscribe for $20 a month.
Rahul built all of it. The front end, the admin panel where he tracks completed jobs and payments, and the verification system that requires ID, plus email and phone confirmation, before anyone can use the platform. All of it, by himself.
Rahul Renaaud, founder of Hustle & Hub.
The Hustle & Hub app sign-up screen lets users choose between finding or offering services.
The app didn’t start with the ambition it has now. Originally, Rahul just wanted to help his friends promote their lawn care businesses to local parents. Something small and local, almost like a digital bulletin board for the kids he knew.
But somewhere in the building process, the scope shifted. “I decided, why not scale this and make this like an actual app?” Rahul said. He expanded Hustle & Hub to support not only students but also professionals, such as plumbers and electricians. The lawn care kids are still the core of the platform right now, about a dozen Hustlers in the Fishers area, but the system was designed to grow beyond that.
The timeline alone is worth noting. Rahul had the idea in late November 2025. He started building in January 2026. By mid-March, the app was live. That’s roughly 10 weeks from the first line of code to a working product with real users.
Rahul attended the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp in Indianapolis, choosing the computer science track. His projects included an anti-procrastination app for high school students and a stock market prediction model built with free API data. But the real takeaway, the thing that made Hustle & Hub possible, was more practical than any single project.
“What it really taught me was utilizing AI in an efficient way to create these apps, which is exactly what I used to build Hustle & Hub,” Rahul said. “I used a lot of AI to help with the code and just figure out problems and security issues.”
That last part, the security piece, turned out to be the hardest part of the entire build. Rahul spent significant time making sure student data was protected, that his API keys weren’t exposed, and that the AI tools he used during development hadn’t accidentally left sensitive information accessible. He ran test after test before going live.
He was also candid about trying to launch too early the first time and finding a pile of mistakes. His parents, who both work in software, helped him test and patch things up before the real launch. The lesson stuck with him. Get it right before you put it out there, even if you’re excited to ship.
Rahul’s high school has a club for student entrepreneurs, and he brought Hustle & Hub to the group, hoping for technical feedback on features and design. What he got was more useful. They told him to put down the marketing plan and start knocking on doors in Fishers, talking to real people and proving the concept worked locally before thinking about anything else.
It shifted his whole strategy. Rahul had been focused on digital promotion, but he realized the app needed to earn trust face-to-face first, in the community where the Hustlers and their customers actually live. A handful of jobs have already been completed through the platform. The numbers are small, but the product is working.
The Hustle & Hub app displays an open service request for lawn mowing on its marketplace.
The Hustle & Hub app allows service providers to select from categories including lawn care, cleaning, pet care and tutoring.
Rahul isn’t chasing investors or mapping out some five-year growth plan. His goal for the next year is to get Hustle & Hub running steadily in Fishers, with a solid base of Hustlers and clients, before expanding to the rest of Indiana or beyond.
When asked what advice he’d give to students heading into this year’s AI Bootcamp who have a business idea but haven’t started building yet, he kept it simple.
“Don’t try and wait for perfection. Really, just get in there and see what’s wrong first so that you can fix it rather than aiming for perfection.”
Rahul’s planning to come back to bootcamp this fall as an ambassador. A year ago, he was a student in a room learning how AI could be used to build things. Now he has a live app, real users, and a sophomore year that most adults would find hard to believe.
Rahul Renaaud is a student alumnus of the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamp in Indianapolis. To learn more about AI Bootcamps, visit markcubanai.org/students
