After years of changing direction, I finally understood something about my product:
I didn't need more features.
I needed more focus.
The project had gone through several versions.
It started as an idea called eHealth.
Then it became a laboratory management system.
Then I expanded it into a hospital management platform.
Each version taught me something, but the hospital platform became too broad.
So I made a difficult product decision.
I removed things.
From everything to one problem
Instead of trying to build software for an entire hospital, I decided to focus on laboratories.
That gave me a much clearer product scope.
I could concentrate on laboratory workflows rather than trying to understand every department in a hospital.
It also changed how I researched.
I wasn't simply asking:
What features can I add?
I started asking:
What does a laboratory actually need?
That distinction changed the development process.
Three weeks of rebuilding
I spent roughly three weeks locked in on the product.
I reviewed the architecture.
I redesigned parts of the UI.
I reworked workflows.
I removed unnecessary functionality.
I researched laboratory operations.
I tested what I had built.
And I used AI as part of my development workflow to accelerate parts of the process while still reviewing and validating the output myself.
The goal wasn't to create a perfect system.
It was to create a usable MVP.
That distinction is important.
A product can stay in development forever if you believe every feature needs to be perfect before anyone sees it.
At some point, you need real users to tell you what you're getting wrong.
The MVP was finally ready for its real test
By the end of those three weeks, I had something I was comfortable putting in front of laboratories.
Not a finished company.
Not a perfect product.
Not a massive healthcare platform.
An MVP.
And that was enough.
Because the next stage wasn't about writing another thousand lines of code.
It was about validation.
Would laboratory directors understand the problem?
Would they trust the system?
Would they be willing to try it?
Would the workflows actually fit the realities of Cameroonian laboratories?
Those were questions that code alone couldn't answer.
So I stopped hiding behind development.
The next part of the journey would require something I hadn't done much of before:
Going out and asking people to use what I had built.
That was when building nanoLabs stopped being purely a development project and started becoming a startup experiment.
