How to manage your side project — now that everyone is working from home

Having a side project and maintaining it is not easy. How many times have you enthusiastically started something only to abandon it again a few days later? I’ve been there. Many times.

They’re called side projects for a reason: By definition it will never be the main thing you are working on. If you are working on it together with friends that makes it even more complicated: Our schedules are different and everyone just works on it whenever they have some time. And now that everyone has to work from home you can’t even get together anymore and hang up your beloved post-its.

That’s why good organisation is in my experience one of the keys to a successful side project.

In this article I want to show you how we organise our side project using the free version of Basecamp — Because after all you are not making any money with your side project yet.

Basecamp labels itself as The All-In-One Toolkit for Working Remotely. In times where we are all forced to stay at home we are all working remotely.

There are many ways to use Basecamp. There’s no right or wrong. I’ve been working remotely for three years now. In this article I captured a few key learnings on how you can apply it today in your next project.

So you don’t have to spend three years of your life figuring it out. How nice of me.

Our project is driven by software development. But you can use this approach for any kind of side project. It doesn’t matter.

#1 Capture your ideas and give everyone a voice

The beginning of a new project is a fantastic time. Anything is possible, there is no scope. No one is telling you what (not) to do. The energy is high.

But this can also be a big challenge. Sometimes you need to let your ideas sit. Some people thrive in high paced environments, bouncing ideas back and forth in real time. Some prefer a longer feedback cycle — Taking your time to think about things, letting it sit and craft a well thought of response.

But we all need to write them down.

Yeah.

Nice!!

I like that idea a lot.

We could definitely start doing that tomorrow.

Versus

Yeah, that actually sounds pretty interesting! That could work. Let’s figure out if there are pragmatic ways of going about that. Have you considered…

Using the Message Board on Basecamp enables us to do exactly that. In a way that encourages everyone to participate at their own pace. For us that’s especially important as we are a team of four spread across three different time zones.

Here’s an example of how we came to a conclusion on which payment provider we want to integrate with.

In one of our kick off calls we all thought we need to have a payment provider enabled to launch. After taking our time and letting everyone craft a reply we came to the conclusion that this is actually not needed. The result: We were ready to launch within days rather than weeks.

I am pretty bad at remembering why a certain decision has been made a week ago. A nice benefit of capturing your thoughts in that way is that you can always come back to it later and read up on it.

#2 Keeping a high level overview of what everyone is working on

So we decided what to work on. And now we spread out. Everything is chaos, no one knows what the other person is working on, especially because we are in three different time zones.

Well not really. We are using Basecamps ToDo feature to keep track of our progress. Now you’re probably wondering “But Yann, I already have twenty seven and a half ToDo apps on my phone. Why would I need another one?”

Glad you asked!

The great thing about this ToDo feature is that ToDos are a) shared with the whole team b) you can group them and c) you can keep a high level overview of them

First we create lists for every high level thing that we’re working on. A list is just a collection of todos.

Here’s how that looks for the payment provider integration that we’re currently working on (Spoiler: We launched without a payment provider and as we got feedback from the market we are now integrating this. More on capturing feedback in a bit)

We currently have three of these “lists” / high level topics that we are working on. Using the HillChart feature we can now track how far along they are.

We created an additional list “High level focus” to keep track of our weekly focus. This is not connected to the lists or the hillchart. It just sits there for additional clarity.

# 3 Capturing feedback and insights

Arguably the most important thing in the early stages of a new project is to listen to how the market reacts to you. For that we are (ab)using the ToDo list feature as well.

What I didn’t tell you yet is that you can create groups within lists as well. That comes in extremely handy when you have to prioritise things. Here’s how that looks for us. Granted, our feedback is quite technical, but you get the idea.

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You can use that way to capture and prioritise any feedback you get about our project. The most important part is that you make this transparent and visible to everyone.

We start a discussion on the ToDo itself and once discussion matures we use the Message Board to write a proper conclusion and approach on how to solve the problem.

Bonus: How we keep track of who is using our service

Bonus because three is my favourite number and it looked better in the title than four.

As people start using your thing it’s probably good to reach out to them and help them get started (and collect their feedback). But it’s easy to lose track of who is doing that and where each user is in the process.

Once again we’re abusing ToDo’s for that. This probably doesn’t scale well as it’s a very manual process but in the early days this is perfectly fine.

We create a ToDo for every new signup and put it into the “Inbox”. Anyone can now assign themselves to that person. Once we reached out to them it moves to “Followed up”. If our onboarding efforts were successful we move it to “Onboarded”. “Onboarderd” means they have all the initial knowledge to use our tool. We leave them in there for a while because it’s a nice feeling and then mark the ToDo as completed. There’s an additional “Churned” group for those that didn’t end up using our service.

And that’s it!

If you’ve made it that far you might be curious what are project is actually about.

Our project helps local businesses struggling with cashflow in times of COVID-19. Pass it along to someone that could use this and make sure those businesses are still around in a few months from now. It’s completely free to use.