When I was studying game development at the University of Utah, we were asked to do one critical thing that has dramatically altered the way I approach personal projects.

It was the wrap kit.

For the first semester in the course, every student worked on 5 games — small one-month projects, all as part of different teams. Once the month was up and the project was finished, or rather whatever state it was in, we were required to submit a wrap kit that consisted of all the work we had done as a team.

Everyone contributed different assets depending on their role. Artists submitted their art assets — whether they ended up being used in the final project or not. Programmers offered a zipped-up version of the project’s codebase. Producers submitted all the design documents, planning documents, and promotional materials that were created.

It gave everyone on the team a sense of closure — something that I’ve come to value a lot now that I’m an indie hacker and freelance writer who is building an audience online.

Why Make a Wrap Kit?

As creative and enterprising individuals, it is natural to be inundated with project ideas. The “Ship Fast” approach also encourages hopping from one idea to the next in quick succession to find product-market fit. The strategy has worked wonders for many indie hackers who are now successfully supporting themselves and are on the path to financial freedom.

However, this relentless pace also comes at a cost if things don’t turn out as you planned. It is easy to work assiduously for years and then end up with hardly any success due to the luck of the draw.

In any room full of indie hackers, you will be able to collect hundreds of private GitHub repositories updated years ago when the enthusiasm for the project was fresh. Whether projects get completed or not, they all end up languishing on Microsoft’s servers with almost no online proof that they ever existed.

All those years of work are essentially just wasted.

The wrap kit is a way to turn all those failed projects into a valuable resource — proof of competence.

An indie hacker’s only chance for success is to build an audience. To do that, you need to have something to share with the world. By converting your past projects into something you can showcase and talk about, you have a readymade well of content that you can dip into to get the initial traction you need.

How Is This Different from A Portfolio?

It’s not. Instead, it is a step towards maximizing the value of your portfolio.

Ask yourself, of all the projects you’ve worked on, how many of them are in a state where you can readily share them with a potential audience of followers or employers?

By making wrap kits along in indie hacking journey, every project you make is another chance to go viral and get that boost of followers you need to increase your reach and build social proof.

So, What Should I Include in A Wrap Kit?

1. Your project’s source code
2. Detailed instructions for building the binary from the source code or deploying it to a production environment. This is very important because every project has a different workflow for setting up data and configuration. It can be hard to remember the right way to get your app production ready if you don’t have documentation. I recommend writing the documentation and then attempting a “no-assumptions” build in a new environment by strictly following it. Iterate on the documentation until you are sure someone who has never worked on the project before can deploy it using just your words.
3. A binary build of the project, if applicable.
4. Visual marketing assets like a cover image and icons. Ideally, you should save the Photoshop or Illustrator files too so that you can tweak the assets in the future.
5. Several screenshots of your app, game, or software in action. These can be used as marketing assets or be added to blog posts on the topic.
6. A trailer that explains the premise of your software and shows off key features.
7. Several video walkthroughs showcasing basic functionality including stand-out features you implemented.
8. Web copy that includes:

   a. The razor: a one-line hook that instantly conveys what you’ve built.

   b. A short description that can fit in a tweet that expands on the razor a little more.

   c. Finally, a full list of features implemented in the project.

9. A postmortem of the project that documents your thoughts about what inspired you to build it, the challenges you faced, the clever solutions you came up with to overcome them, and the mistakes you made that led to its failure or what you did right that led to its success.

Advantages Of a Wrap Kit

First and foremost, it opens the option for you to develop your brand. Launching your projects in some form or other gives you a chance to talk about and link to them. When you have a plethora of projects in your portfolio, you instantly get the validity of being a finisher — a reliable person who can see a project through to its finish (regardless of whether the project turned out as you originally envisioned it). It is akin to social proof for others in your line of work — whatever it might be.

Next, the wrap kit philosophy leads to the creation of assets that can be instantly published online. Your project’s postmortem can be a blog post. The trailer, feature videos, and screenshots can be cut into a YouTube video by splicing them between clips of you simply talking about the project in front of a camera.

It also helps you document all the relevant details of the project for posterity. Whether you interact with others in your industry through Twitter threads or go on podcasts, by writing down everything about the process, the details of the project are always at the top of your mind.

The postmortem can also help you avoid the mistakes you made while working on the project, in the future. Moreover, these lessons can be converted into content where you share your mistakes with the community and point them in the right direction.

Finally, wrapping up projects gives you the confidence of having made progress even if the result did not end up being a “success.” The closure you get enables you to leave your mistakes behind you and start your new projects with a renewed assurance that you have learned from your mistakes and won’t make them again.

My Own Experience

Wrap kits have helped me tremendously. The emotional impact of looking back at the last 10 years of the work I’ve done boosts my morale and reinforces my belief that someday, I’ll make it. Even if I haven’t had success yet, my efforts have not gone to waste.

I’m still in the process of uploading all the content to my website but you can browse through some of the projects I’ve worked on my website.