What a Special Project Is — and Why a Third of Our Basecamp Is Free

A Special Project is work we do for free. No invoice, no retainer, no scope document with a number at the bottom. It’s how we say yes to the people who have already said yes to us — friends, lighthouses, partners, and the colleagues who help us back.

Open our Basecamp account and you’ll find 1,053 projects. 366 of them are named Special Project: — more than a third of everything we run.

That number surprises people. It’s supposed to. Most agencies treat free work as a leak to be plugged. We treat it as a category with its own naming convention, its own setup checklist, and its own row in the operating system.

This is the definitive article on what a Special Project is, who gets one, how we set them up, and why a third of our Basecamp is unpaid on purpose.

The definition

A Special Project is an engagement we run at no charge for someone in one of four buckets:

• Friends of Dennis. People he’s known for years, often from before any of this existed. The relationship predates the business and outranks it.
• Lighthouses. The marquee people and brands we’re genuinely connected to, whose credibility lifts ours when we’re associated with them. We don’t buy this and we don’t fake it — we earn it by doing the work well.
• Partners. Agencies and operators building on our rails, where helping them win is how we win.
• Colleagues who help us back. The reciprocity bucket. Someone opens a door, makes an introduction, teaches our team something, brings us on stage — and we build them something.

The common thread isn’t charity. It’s that the exchange isn’t denominated in dollars. Something real is moving in both directions; it just isn’t an invoice.

Why a third of our Basecamp is free

Four reasons, in order of how much they actually matter.

1. It’s how the network compounds

Every Special Project puts a real, working asset in the hands of someone who talks to the people we want to reach. Not a case study we wrote about ourselves — a live site, a Knowledge Panel, a content system that person now owns and points at. That’s a referral engine you can’t buy.

2. Free work is the honest version of a portfolio

Anyone can claim capability. A Special Project is capability delivered, in public, with the person’s name on it and no money changing hands to muddy the story. When we say we build personal brand systems, we can point at hundreds of them.

3. It’s where the methodology gets stress-tested

Our SOPs, skills and agents get sharpened on Special Projects before they touch paid work. A weird schema problem, a broken publishing path, an audit that reads wrong — we’d rather find it here. Much of what’s now standard practice across our whole fleet was first learned on a project nobody was paying for.

4. Reciprocity is not a strategy, it’s a default

People help us constantly — introductions, stages, feedback, testing, teaching our team. Building something for them is the least transactional way to say thank you, and it’s the one that lasts.

How Special Projects differ from paid work

Our Basecamp naming tells you what kind of engagement you’re looking at before you open it:

The naming is load-bearing, not cosmetic. Our scheduled agents read it: the task-defaults agent skips anything starting with XXX, and reporting rolls up by prefix. Rename a project carelessly and you change what the robots do.

How we set one up

Every Special Project gets an identical skeleton. This is the checklist.

Name it

Special Project: [Person or Company] — the person’s real name if it’s a personal brand, the company name if it’s a business. No abbreviations, no internal shorthand. Someone should be able to find it by typing the name they know.

Add the tools

Message Board, To-dos, and Docs & Files at minimum. Calendar, Chat and Card Table come along by default and are fine to leave on.

Invite the standard three, plus the client

• Dennis Yu — owner/admin
• Muzamil (Operations) — admin, project manager on nearly every one
• Dylan Haugen — build and execution
• The client — added as a client-role member when we’re ready for them to see it

Additional team members get added per project as the work demands.

Create the five standard threads

Write the Project Overview with a parseable RACI

This isn’t documentation theatre. Our scheduled agent that fills in missing task assignees reads this thread. It looks for a message titled “Project Overview” and parses these exact labels:

• Project Lead:
• Project Manager:
• Accountable:

The name it finds must belong to someone currently on the project. If it can’t find an unambiguous match, every unassigned task defaults to Operations. A missing or vaguely-worded Project Overview quietly dumps the whole project’s task load on one person.

Run the access checklist

Same nine rows as any paying client: Search Console, CMS admin, GA4, Google Tag Manager, DNS/registrar, Google Business Profile, YouTube, social accounts, ad accounts. Record what we have and what’s outstanding in the Access thread. Free doesn’t mean unmeasured — if we can’t see Search Console, we can’t tell anyone whether the work did anything.

Examples

A selection from the 366. They fall into recognizable groups.

Personal brands — athletes, speakers, authors, operators

Agencies and partners building on our rails

Local service businesses

Companies, institutions and communities

You’ll also see a run of projects named … Power Hour — Damon Burton, David Slepak, So Okazaki, Aiden Chong, Mark McShurley, John Hutchinson, Valence Supply. Those are single working sessions where we sit down with someone for an hour and fix the thing that’s actually blocking them. It’s the smallest possible Special Project, and often the most useful.

How a Special Project ends

Three ways, all of them fine.

• It finishes. The site is live, the panel triggers, the system runs. We stop. The project stays in Basecamp as the record.
• It goes quiet. Life happens, priorities move. We don’t chase. The project gets an XXX prefix so the automations skip it, and the door stays open.
• It becomes paid work. Sometimes someone wants more than we’re going to do for free, and asks. Then it gets renamed into the client tiers and starts behaving like a retainer. Nobody engineers this and nobody is compensated for making it happen.

If you want one

There’s no application. Special Projects come out of relationships, and relationships come out of showing up. The people on that list mostly didn’t ask — they helped with something, or taught us something, or were simply around long enough that building them something was the obvious next move.

The practical version of the advice: go do the free version yourself first. Everything we use on a Special Project is published — the audit method, the personal brand rubric, the skill packs, the agents. Run it on your own brand. The people who do that are the ones we end up building things for, because they’ve already proven they’ll use it.

Counts in this article were pulled live from our Basecamp account and are accurate as of August 1, 2026: 1,053 total projects, 366 named Special Project:, of which 10 carry the XXX inactive prefix. The roster shown is a selection, not the full list.