I built a side project with a friend — and it’s way better than working alone.

Tomorrow, my friend and I are launching the side-project we’ve been working on for the past 3 months: Jots—a simple, developer-focused journaling tool with just a touch of AI.

Since I have been a dev, for the past 4+ years, I’ve always had side projects. My biggest one was Just Remind, which I created to stop forgetting the books I read.

The reason I build side projects is because I enjoy building stuff for fun. Mostly stuff that help me in my day-to-day. Stuff that solve my own problems, and hopefully help other people too. Being a dev is kinda like a superpower, to be able to take a problem and build yourself the solution. I love it!

But this was the first time I was working on a hobby project with someone else. Not building alone is a game changer. It cuts the burden of everything you have to do in half!

With this article, I want to share how our project started, to hopefully inspire some people to reach out to a friend and start building something together.

We built something to solve our own problem.

A key rule of project building (aka entrepreneurship) is to build a product that solves your own problem. Since creating something from scratch is immensely hard and requires a huge load of discipline and motivation, you’d better be off solving something you actually need for yourself.

So, Jots was born out of a shared frustration that we discovered while just talking with each other: as developers, we constantly code, debug, and maintain stuff, but we rarely pause to reflect, learn and grow. That was the basis of our problem. When we looked for solutions (every problem has at least two solutions), we discovered journaling.

Journaling is the intentional act of writing down your thoughts to reflect on them, leading to both personal and professional growth.

This solution looked like a great candidate for solving our problem, so we looked for existing journaling tools, but they all felt generic or bloated. We wanted something that felt like it was made for us—developers who want to improve their technical skills, track their progress, and drive their career growth.

So we said to each other “hey, why don’t we build our own?”. And things got started.

So you have a problem and a potential solution. Now what?

Now is the moment when you should validate your idea. Is the problem real or only in your head? Is your solution really solving this problem? Is there any better solution?

You’ll see a lot of advice online on this part, saying that you need to survey people, building a landing page, etc. But it’s difficult and not bullet-proof.

Another way is check if you have competition. Is there any other product out there, seemingly solving the same problem? If yes, that’s your confirmation. Unless you intend on investing your life savings into the project, this confirmation is enough for now.

So that’s what we did. Although we did not see any journaling tool dedicated specifically for devs, we saw many successful journaling tools for personal use. For us, that means that the need is real, people want to journal, and that it has benefits—it helps people improve.

Free and Open Source First

You’re working on a product, nobody knows you, why should they trust you?

That’s what we thought at first and that’s why we’re launching Jots free and open-source. We use open-source tools everyday. This is our way of giving back to the community. It felt like a good approach.

Our philosophy is simple: build something real, solve your own problem well, and only then consider monetization if it makes sense. Jots is built for the community, and we want to keep it that way. We are launching tomorrow the beta version for early-bird users, the kind that are not afraid to try new tools. And we have a Discord so they can participate in the product creation, by sharing ideas and feedback.

We also tried our best to build this as cheaply as possible to minimize our financial risk. And we’re lucking nowadays that there is plenty of free tools out there that enable any dev to build anything for pretty much free. So if you are part of a open-source community or if you ever contributed to open-source, we want to say thank you. We love you.

Enjoy the process, there is so much to learn

When building on the side, you have the freedom to work the way you want. To try things maybe you couldn’t try in a professional environment. To practice decision-making, that again maybe you wouldn’t at work. To be exposed to new problems, to new solutions, and to new learnings.

It is so rewarding. But it is also so demanding.

If you have a full-time job, building a side-project means sacrificing some a lot of your free hours. If you have normally a busy schedule, it means getting up earlier to work on it, or going to bed later. And working during your lunch break. And working during the weekend (today is a sunny Sunday, and I’ve spent already 4 hours on this side project, inside, while everybody is relaxing outside).

But in the end, you can feel proud to have a bit of yourself out there in the wild. Hopefully positively impacting people’s lives, even at a tiny scale (there’s nothing more joyful than receiving a thank you message by someone using your product).

Besides all the technical things you learn, you will also learn about the specific domain you are working on. For example with Jots, we learned so much about journaling, how it can help anyone get better.

Just Do It.

Reach out to a friend, to a co-worker or maybe a stranger on Reddit (but stay safe).

By the way, if you have a story of you building a product with other people, I’d love to hear it! Drop it in the comments below or to send me a message via Linkedin.

If you want to give journaling a shot, take some pen and paper, or fire up Notion, or try Jots if you want some augmented experience.

And if you want to give some love to Jots on Product Hunt, here’s the way → https://www.producthunt.com/products/jots?launch=jots

Thank you for reading, and happy coding!