One of the biggest mistakes I made while building my healthcare software was believing that more features automatically meant more value.
At one point, I was building a hospital management platform.
It had multiple user roles.
Different departments.
Different workflows.
And a growing number of ideas.
Technically, it was exciting.
Product-wise, it was becoming a problem.
A bigger product gave me a bigger problem
The more I researched hospitals, the more I realized how much I didn't know.
A hospital isn't one system.
It's a collection of many complex systems and workflows.
You have:
Clinical workflows
Nursing workflows
Laboratory workflows
Patient management
Administration
Finance
Reporting
Inventory
Each one can become an entire product on its own.
And I was trying to build around all of them.
That meant constantly making assumptions.
The more I added, the more assumptions I had to make.
Eventually, I stopped and asked:
What problem do I understand best?
For me, the answer was laboratories.
Going smaller gave the product direction
The decision was simple.
I removed the goal of immediately building for the entire hospital.
I focused on the laboratory.
That gave me a much clearer product direction.
Instead of asking:
How do I build software for every hospital department?
I started asking:
How does a laboratory actually operate?
What happens when a patient arrives?
How are tests requested?
How do samples move through the workflow?
How are results entered, reviewed and released?
What information does the laboratory staff actually need?
These questions were more specific.
And because they were more specific, I could research them better.
Focus is not a lack of ambition
At first, narrowing the product felt like reducing the size of my ambition.
Now I see it differently.
Focus is what makes ambition executable.
A focused product can:
Reach users faster
Be easier to test
Receive clearer feedback
Solve a specific problem properly
Avoid unnecessary features
Develop a stronger product identity
That decision became one of the foundations of what is now nanoLabs.
The hospital platform I had imagined wasn't necessarily a bad idea.
It was simply too broad for where I was at the time.
I needed to understand one problem deeply before trying to solve ten.
So I chose the laboratory.
That decision changed the product.
It changed my research.
It changed the market I was targeting.
And eventually, it gave the project a new identity.
nanoLabs was beginning to exist.
The next challenge was turning that clearer idea into something people could actually recognize, use and eventually trust.
