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6 Comments

What software do you use to collaborate on small, one-shot projects with freelancers?

Hey 👋

I've used many tools (trello, asana, clickup, basecamp, jira, github, gitlab, and many more ... ) during projects & consulting work. Now I’m collaborating with copywriters, designers, marketers for my own small projects. I feel like most of the tools are not really good for that. They are huge and focus on long term projects. What I want is simply a place to have some short lived gigs - prepare a design for a web page, landing, presentation, illustrations and other.

We're 2 with my co-founder. Usually, my use case is just 3 people collaborating with 1–2 freelancers per project.

What I need is something like:

  • a wiki page (markdown)
  • chat board
  • files (versioned + comments)
  • todo list with reminders

I'd create a new page for each gig. It should just be easy to archive and search through them. No need to track time, kanban board or anything like that. Just a single place of truth about work, communication history and all deliverables.

Also pricing model for most of the tools i have used is not really good for this way of working. My projects are very short (1-3 weeks). I don’t want to have to pay for 10 accounts for whole year so I can work with 7 freelancers for 10 days each.

Let me know what are you using. Any advices?

  1. 1

    Are you looking for all those features in one place? We use Notion internally building Pagereview and it hits the boxes you're looking for.

    The only part I'm unsure about is involving external people (freelancers in your case). I haven't needed to play around too much with the user permissions or governance process as we're a two person team at the moment.

  2. 1

    If it should be very flexible and easy to access I would also use Google Docs or Notion and invite Freelancers to the folders/documents/pages.
    Or if you need more structure you could also try tools like basecamp.com

    1. 1

      Do you have some process in place?

      Basecamp pricing model is great for agency. Not so great for small product team 😕

      1. 1

        I don't work with freelancers that often to be in need of real process unfortunately. That's why I go with a notion page where I invite the freelancer, collect & link all necessary ressources/documents/etc., have some kanban-like board to jot in the tasks and check the progress and have some kind of time/budget information where the freelancer updates their current outstanding costs. The great thing with notion is, that you can build page templates that you can then use for every project you create. I didn't have the need for that yet.

        1. 1

          Sounds good 💪

          Thanks for sharing 🙏

  3. 1

    Just a couple thoughts :)

    Personally I use Google Meet/Docs/Gmail and Figma for everything :)

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