The Opening Scene

You a solo freelancer, someone(s) non-technical with a nice idea arrives at you. And you take upon yourself to build the project. You have to kickstart it, select the tools, the infrastructure, and give it a go. You know that others may join you later, and eventually, you will need to hand it over so you cannot be too idiosyncratic in your selections.

What Do You Need?

You need the following tools:

1. Project management
2. Issue tracking
3. Messaging
4. Information sharing

Often the people with the idea are not technical so you cannot force upon them your favorite tool, hoping they will learn it. They will just throw it away if they get frustrated.

My Toolbox

This is my toolbox for such situations:

1. Trello for project management and issue tracking
2. Slack for messaging
3. Evernote for sharing information

These worked for me in several projects where the founders knew little about technology. For instance, they had no idea what is GitHub and never heard of Slack before.