Hi, I'm Phil Freo

I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project:

TeamHome.app – An internal company directory designed for remote teams. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Read on for details & some background…

Tweetstorm version here:

🚀 I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project:https://t.co/sWnZ4ARwGt – An internal company directory designed for remote teams.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

👇 Read on for details & behind-the-scenes…

— Phil Freo (@philfreo) December 23, 2020

Some screenshots:

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I built TeamHome to both:

• give me what I always wished existed for seeing my remote team
• productize some ideas I think have helped Close as we’ve grown from 6 to 40+ people remotely.

It has 2 modes:

1. Just you – visualize your coworkers’ time zones, see a world map of your company, & embed to keep your public About/Team page always up-to-date.
2. Team – when embraced company wide, everyone has rich profiles/bios to serve as an official company directory.

Big companies get entire teams dedicated to building internal tools.

I wanted to help smaller companies… to make smooth what’s commonly a duck tape solution where companies keep their team information together across wikis, spreadsheets, manual emails, google docs, etc.

It’s been years since I’ve created a product from scratch, and I was getting the itch to make something new. I wanted to try out some new frameworks and just experiment some. Side projects are great for that.

Been working on a side project (hope to launch soon) and it's been a good reminder – side projects are *so good* for learning new technologies, experimenting with new ideas, playing with new SaaS services, and just building something in a quick and low-stakes way.

— Phil Freo (@philfreo) November 20, 2020

There’s basically nothing brand new here, just packaging together a few different ideas in a hopefully useful way:

• Stripe Home
• User Manuals
• Mapbox maps, Slack API, Tailwind UI, etc. (details further on)

This was just a little side project for me… why did I bother?

• To see something like this in the world
• To experiment w/new tech & building from scratch
• To stay sane during a pandemic

Plus, I’ve seen how useful User Manuals can be, especially when new hires join

Give it a shot – you can use it for free and see your team as soon as you sign in with Slack. I’d really love any feedback!

TeamHome.app

Behind-the-scenes

Building a SaaS like this has never been easier. I got some questions on what it’s built with.

So I wanted to give some shout outs to what made building TeamHome in a very limited amount of time possible… 🙌

• App UI: Tailwind UI components made it easy to quickly create something that feels rather polished.
• CSS: Tailwind, which I really started liking and would choose for future projects.
• Icons: Heroicons.com pair nicely with the above
• JavaScript: Stimulus – paired nicely with Rails to give my JS some structure. For any site that isn’t a SPA but needs some JS, this is a really great choice.
• Backend: Ruby on Rails – such a rich ecosystem of gems meant I wasn’t reinventing the wheel.

A few more:

• Mapbox – Beautiful maps API
• Slack – Thanks for a rather open API that let’s you see your entire Team automatically
• Render – A formidable Heroku competitor at lower cost
• Stripe – With Checkout & Customer Portal, I had to write almost no billing-related code

And lots of open source code. As I mentioned, mostly just glueing ideas together.