Building Products on the Side of a Freelance Career

Since mid-2023 and the creation of Jungle Labs, I've been juggling a full-time freelance engagement and my own products -- Inner Gallery, Coachy. Freelancing pays the bills. The products, developed on my own time, represent my future.

The reality of freelancing + products

You've probably already read articles promising you can "build your empire on weekends." The truth is more nuanced. When you spend 40-50 hours a week on a client project, there's not much creative energy left for your personal work.

I've tried several approaches:

• Waking up at 5 AM to code before the gig (lasted 2 weeks)
• Coding sessions until midnight (guaranteed burnout)
• Weekends dedicated to products (social exhaustion)

My current organizational system

Context batching

Instead of switching between client work and products within the same day, I group similar activities together. Concrete examples:

"Client" days: 100% focus on the client. No personal notifications, no "just 5 minutes" on Inner Gallery. This focus lets me deliver quickly and save energy for later.

"Product" blocks: Usually mornings when I'm at my most creative, or full afternoons when the client engagement allows. I shut off Slack, Teams, and focus on a single feature at a time.

Admin/marketing: Friday afternoons or Sundays. Responding to emails, updating the website, analyzing metrics. No code, just business.

Flexibility above all

Contrary to conventional advice, I don't have a rigid schedule like "Monday client, Tuesday products." Why? Because creative energy can't be scheduled.

Some mornings I wake up with a clear idea for Inner Gallery. Other times it's after a frustrating client meeting that I feel like blowing off steam on personal code. I've learned to follow those signals.

Energy management: the forgotten key

Resources aren't limited to time. There are three types of energy to manage:

Creative energy: For architecture, design, new features. It's strongest in the morning and gets depleted by meetings and repetitive tasks.

Execution energy: For coding things already defined, fixing bugs, implementing. Available even at the end of the day.

Social energy: For client calls, negotiations, networking. Limited and precious.

My rule: I use creative energy for my products and save execution energy for client work whenever possible.

Concrete tools and techniques

Obsidian as an external brain

I use Obsidian with two vaults: one for technical matters, one for business strategy. Every idea, bug, or insight is captured immediately. This prevents losing ideas when I'm in "client mode."

Git as a timeline

All my products are in mono-repos with descriptive commits. This lets me quickly pick up where I left off, even after a week away. Long-lived feature branches are my friends.

Docker for isolation

All my dev environments are dockerized. Spinning up the Coachy API + Flutter app takes 30 seconds, even after 10 days without touching it. Zero friction to switch between projects.

What doesn't work

Micro-sessions: "I'll code for 30 minutes on Inner Gallery during lunch." The context switching cost is too high. Better to wait until you have 2-3 hours straight.

Rigid scheduling: "Every morning from 6 to 8 AM." Creative energy doesn't respect schedules. When it's there, I ride it. When it's not, I lean into execution work.

Personal deadlines: "I'm launching Inner Gallery v2 on December 31." With a full-time engagement, that's impossible to hit. I prefer progression goals over fixed deadlines.

The financial side

Let's talk money. Freelance gigs fund product development. That represents 100% of my income right now -- Inner Gallery and Coachy are still in pre-launch. The time investment is real, but that's the plan.

This asymmetry is deliberate and temporary. Every euro earned freelancing that isn't needed for living expenses goes into a "product fund": servers, tools, eventually some paid marketing.

The goal: flip the ratio within 2-3 years. But without burning bridges with freelance clients, who remain a valuable safety net.

My mistakes and lessons learned

Mistake #1: Trying to optimize every hour. I spent more time organizing my schedule than coding.

Mistake #2: Feeling guilty during "unproductive" time. Outdoor exercise on a Sunday afternoon is necessary recovery.

Mistake #3: Promising clients overly tight deadlines to save personal time. That always backfires.

Key lesson: Consistency beats intensity. One hour a day for a month is better than 15 hours in a weekend followed by nothing for three weeks.

Practical advice to get started

If you're in a similar situation, here's where to begin:

1. Track your energy for a week. Note when you're at your most creative, most productive, most social.

1. Start small: one feature per week for your product, not an entire app.

1. Automate your setup: Docker, scripts, aliases. Anything that reduces friction when switching between projects.

1. Communicate with your clients: explain that you have personal projects. Good clients respect that.

1. Keep a financial buffer: 2-3 months of expenses, so you can turn down a toxic engagement without stress.

Also worth reading

• Solo Studio: Organization, Tools, and Reality
• Two and a Half Years of Jungle Labs: What I've Learned
• Why I Stopped Building Showcase Websites

Building products on the side of a freelance career is neither a sprint nor a marathon. It's more like a mountain hike: it goes up, it goes down, sometimes you stop and rest, but you keep moving forward.

What matters is finding your rhythm and sticking with it. Not someone else's, not the rhythm from productivity books -- yours.