A side business — or a small farm, or a ministry, or any serious commitment that lives outside your day job — runs on a thin slice of your week. Two evenings, a Saturday morning, the half-hour before the kids wake up. The thinness isn't the problem; the problem is what happens between the slices. Five days pass and by the time you sit back down on Saturday, you've forgotten what you decided last weekend, what you were going to follow up on, and what the conversation with the supplier was supposed to be about.
The fix isn't a heavier project tool. It's a vault that holds the context across thin time slices, with an agent that can read across all of it and orient you in the first ten minutes when you sit back down. The same shape underwrites how first-time founders move faster on early projects and how solopreneurs run their operating system from notes — different scale, same compression-of-time problem.
A vault shaped around the side project, not your full life
The shape that holds up across project types — micro-SaaS, farm, food cart, ministry, podcast — is roughly: one top-level page for the project, with sub-pages for the operating notes, the decisions log, the customer or community context, the financial record summary, and the running ideas list. A separate top-level page for "this week" — the weekly review, the open followups, the priority for the next session.
Capy supports unlimited page nesting, so a more complex project can fan out by area. The whole vault is plain markdown. That matters because when you sit down on Saturday morning with a coffee and three hours, you don't want to spend the first hour figuring out what you were doing last weekend. You ask the agent to read across the project pages and write a one-paragraph orientation: where you left off, what's open, what's the most leveraged thing to do today. Five minutes. Then you work.
The capture habit during the week
The hardest part of running a side project isn't the work — it's holding the context during the days you can't actively work on it. The thought you had on Tuesday at lunch about the pricing change. The customer email that came in Wednesday that needs a reply by next weekend. The supplier issue you noticed driving past the farm Thursday morning. By Saturday, half of those have evaporated.
A working setup: when something side-project-relevant happens during the week, you drop a one-line entry into a "this week" capture page on your phone. Two minutes, max. You're not solving anything; you're capturing the breadcrumb. The thought, the email, the issue — whatever it is, with enough context that future-you on Saturday can act on it.
By Saturday, the capture page has a list of breadcrumbs from the week. The first thing you do is ask the agent to read them, sort them by which need action this weekend versus which can wait, and propose entries for the project's followups database. Twenty minutes of triage produces a clear weekend agenda. The thoughts you'd otherwise have lost are now in the working record. (The capture-while-it's-fresh habit is the same one underwriting the capture habit for remembering everything that actually matters.)
A weekend session that doesn't restart from zero
The five days between sessions are the structural enemy of side-project momentum. Most people lose the first hour of every weekend session re-orienting — what was I working on, what did I decide, what's the state of the customer's question. The hour adds up to a quarter of your working time gone to context-rebuild.
A working flow: when you sit down on Saturday, ask the agent to read the project's recent notes — the captures from the week, the last weekend's session recap, the open followups, any new customer or community signal — and draft a one-page brief for the session: where you left off, what you committed to do this weekend, what's the most leveraged single thing to start with. You read it, you adjust it, you start working. The first hour stops being context-rebuild and starts being actual work.
At the end of the session, ask the agent to read what you did and draft a session recap in two paragraphs. The recap goes on the operating-notes page so next weekend's brief can include it. The continuity stops being a thing you maintain manually.
Decisions written with the rationale, not just the outcome
Side-project decisions get made in narrow windows and forgotten by the next window. The reason you priced the product the way you did. The reason you said no to the wholesale account. The reason you switched suppliers. Three months later, when you're considering changing the price or revisiting the supplier choice, the rationale is gone and you re-decide from scratch — sometimes badly.
The fix is mechanical. An inline decisions database in the project's top-level page via the :::database::: directive — rows for date, decision, rationale, area affected, and what triggered it. The database lives directly in the page, not in a separate tab.
After every weekend session where you made a real call, ask the agent to read the session recap and propose decision entries with rationales. You confirm or edit; the rationale lands while it's still fresh. When the question comes back, you read the entry instead of reconstructing the reasoning. (The same decisions-log discipline is the spine of contract negotiation with AI notes.)
Customer and community context that survives the gap
The hardest interpersonal part of a side project run in narrow windows is holding the context of customer and community relationships across long gaps. The customer you sold to two months ago who emailed last week with a question. The volunteer who helped at the last event and is asking about the next one. The neighbor who supplies the eggs and texted about availability. Each interaction is small, but cumulatively the gap is large.
A working setup: a sub-page per significant relationship — customer, community member, supplier, peer. Drop a one-line entry after every interaction with the date and the substance. Two minutes. Over a year, the page becomes the primary-source archive of the relationship.
Before responding to that customer's email or texting back the supplier, ask the agent to read the page and remind you of the context. You walk into the response having actually remembered the relationship — even though it's been six weeks since you thought about it. (The same context-holding habit is the spine of how account managers keep client context from slipping — different scale, identical mechanic.)
Financial record summary, not full bookkeeping
Most side projects don't justify a real accounting setup, but they do justify keeping a running summary of what's coming in and what's going out, in language you can actually parse on Saturday morning.
A working setup: a financial-summary sub-page with a simple inline database via the :::database::: directive — rows for date, amount, category, description. The database lives directly in the page, alongside short narrative paragraphs about what the financial picture is doing this month. Pull the data from your actual books or bank account; the vault holds the narrative interpretation.
Ask the agent monthly to read the entries and the prior month's narrative, and to draft an updated narrative paragraph: how this month compared to last, what categories drifted, what the cash position looks like, what's the implication for the next quarter's decisions. You edit. The financial picture stops being a thing you avoid looking at because looking at it requires assembly.
The PDFs your side project accumulates live the same way — the supplier's terms, the local-government permit, the equipment manual, the insurance certificate. Drop them on the relevant page; they auto-convert to markdown via docstrange so the agent can read them as searchable text. When the question comes up about minimum orders or what the permit requires at renewal, you ask and get the relevant clause back. The agent isn't running OCR on every query; it's reading text it already has.
What this isn't
Capy isn't a real-time business operations tool. The structured side of a side business — the e-commerce store, the booking system, the bank account, the actual farm operations — still lives where it lives. Capy is for the unstructured side: the operating notes, the decisions, the relationship context, the captures from the week, the weekend session brief. That's the part that's currently sprawled across notebooks and your memory and a folder of half-finished docs.
It's also single-user by design. One operator, one vault. If your side project has grown into a partnership where the partners need to edit the same artifacts with role-based permissions, that isn't this product. The shape that fits is the operator running the personal connective layer alongside whatever shared tools the side project uses. Pricing tiers are on the pricing page.
A small first test
Take next weekend. On Friday evening, set up a "this week" capture page for the side project and start dropping the breadcrumbs from your day-job week. On Saturday morning, ask the agent to read the captures plus the last session's recap, and draft a one-page brief for the session. If the brief catches a thread you'd otherwise have lost, that's the agent doing for you what running a side project in narrow windows asks for and rarely gets.
Try Docapybara free. Load one weekend of side-project notes and see what the next session feels like.