Software idea - All in one management system for freelance developers
Hello everyone!
I'm planning to build a software for freelance software developers for managing clients, meetings, payments etc. I thought people might also be interested in similar solutions so yeah, feel free to share your thoughts here. I'd love to have a chat!
As a freelance software engineer I used to face some challenges. One of my biggest pain points was managing clients. I had to communicate in Facebook, WhatsApp, sometimes in the built-in chat of traditional freelancing platforms. All of it was quite a hassle. I also had to manage separate doc files with the software requirements, manage the changes and what not. On top of that, I wanted to ensure transparency and tried to provide the clients with a live demo of the current development state of the software (for web projects primarily) when possible.
Managing all of it was quite a pain in the bottoms 🙃. So I am trying to build something that I would use.
- A single platform where you can communicate with your clients
- Schedule and attend meetings
- Manage all the requirements of the project
- Let the clients know about the current development stage (whether it is simply showing the completed tasks/modules or giving a link to the live demo).
Please let me know if you'll be interested in such a software solution. Also as I've said before, feel free to share your thoughts and pain points as a freelance software developer.
Cheers.
I think one thing especially for payments that we found is that businesses can tend to enforce this across multiple freelancers, vs the other way round. That's why we ended up with lancr.co to bring the freelancer contracts and then track time and auto pay
This could be useful, but Notion is super popular and can be used for a similar purpose, not to mention it being free for personal use. Kirbby makes a good point about freelancers usually adapting to their clients main method of communication. I think, for this to succeed, you will need to get real specific and solve pain points that Notion can't solve for a freelancer. Hope this helps :)
Not sure if you've heard of Intercom ,which could basically fulfill your first requirement.
But in total, I think your idea has a big scope, which can leads to a big and long project? All-in-one usually means you cannot be the best in each aspect.
Yeah I'm aware of the scope of the project. It's quite large to be honest. But I personally really wanted something that would put everything in one place (or let's say a lot of things). I have already started to develop it just because it's a cool project 😄. Even if it fails (I hope it wouldn't. Fingers crossed) it'll still be an impressive piece of software that I can boast about
Interesting idea. You might want to look at Honeybook.com for a service that's aimed at freelancers (not developers specifically). They don't do the thing of collapsing all the various channels into one communication tool... but that might be a harder trick than it looks like. Or, wait, are you saying you'd move clients over to your thing? That wouldn't work with my clients, because they are using this or that tool internally already and they want you to make life easy for them by using whatever they're using... Scheduling meetings seems to be out there in lots of places, though I get it that your point is that here it would be right alongside everything else you're tracking. Anyway, I'll be interested to see how this progresses.
thanks a lot for the feedback. yeah many people won't find certain features useful. However, I'm hopeful that this'll be a good project nonetheless.
I find it hard to imagine clients adding another communication app/platform just to communicate with you.
Usually the freelancer adapts to the clients preferences.
The rest sounds like it could be a good thing if implemented well to keep a good overview.
Got it! Thanks a lot for the feedback 😃
My freelance management consisted of Google Calendar, Trello and Skype. It worked perfectly if you had the right flow. These days I use Notion which combines all three, plus more.
Hmm yeah that makes sense. I had quite a problem finding that flow tbh. So i guess I'll need to build it anyway just for me 🙃
PS, yeah notion is absolutely awesome.