A complete freelance operating system built in Notion — clients, proposals, projects, tasks, invoices, income and expenses in one connected workspace. Designed, built and launched as a Free and Pro template, with its own landing page and store.
The problem
Most freelancers run their entire business across four disconnected apps — a project manager here, a CRM there, an invoice tool somewhere else, a time tracker on the side. Every one has a monthly fee, and none of them talk to each other, so the freelancer becomes the glue: copy-pasting between tabs, manually checking what's overdue, and building a system out of workarounds. The tools are either overkill, built for agencies with a team to feed, or oversimplified, a spreadsheet with ambitions. After a lifetime of freelancing I'd tried most of them, and none quite fit the way a one-person business actually works.
The insight
A freelancer's needs come in two stages. First you need to organize your work — who your clients are, what you're building for them and what's due today. Then you need to run the business — send proposals, chase invoices, know what you've earned, set tax money aside and see what you've spent. Most tools blur the two, and everything gets heavier than it needs to be. So Solo HQ draws the line deliberately: one workspace, seven connected sections, where changing something in one place updates it everywhere else. No manual syncing, no tab switching, and no subscription — it lives in Notion's free tier, bought once and kept.
A key decision
The real design work was invisible: clients link to projects, projects to tasks, tasks to invoices, invoices to income. Get those relationships right and the dashboards fill themselves in. On top of that sat a handful of deliberate calls. Free covers organizing your work — Clients, Projects, Tasks — as a genuine working template rather than a demo, while Pro covers running the business. The locked sections in Free aren't dead ends: each is a designed preview that says what the section does and why it matters. Every dashboard follows one rule — scannable in seconds, not read like a spreadsheet — so each shows only the columns its purpose needs, stacked full-width after side-by-side columns proved to feel unorganised in a tool with no visual containers. And color does quiet work: tasks are blue, clients purple, projects orange, money green.
The template
Clients, Proposals, Projects, Tasks, Invoices, Income Log and Expenses — each with its own dashboard, and each wired to the rest. Proposals track every quote from draft to approval and flag what needs a follow-up. Invoices number themselves and flag what's overdue. The Income Log sets aside a share for tax on every payment, and Expenses keeps what's tax-deductible a filter away at the end of the year. A Getting Started guide and seven ready-to-use email scripts — proposal follow-ups, project kick-offs, invoice chasers — make it usable on day one, even if you've never opened Notion before.
The marketing site
A template is only as good as the page that explains it. trysolohq.com makes the case in order — the problem, the fix, what's inside, a clear Free versus Pro comparison — in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework, hosted on Cloudflare Pages with scroll animations kept light. The email signup feeds a five-lesson course on running a freelance business, and the page's supporting numbers were fact-checked against sources, with two corrected before launch. I chose cookie-free analytics deliberately: no consent banner standing between a visitor and the page. Behind it sit a Gumroad store, a Notion Template Gallery submission and an Etsy listing, all pointing home.
Visit the live site
End to end
Product thinking, information architecture, the Notion build, the Free and Pro split, the brand, the landing page, the store, the email course, the domain and the hosting — all designed and built by one person, learning Notion in the process. It's built for the way I actually work: the system I run my own freelance business on, turned into something anyone else can pick up and use.
