Labmate: Scheduling for Wet-Lab Experiments

My wife runs immunology experiments with a complex schedule: some steps are timed from a “day zero,” others from a previous step. She planned them in a paper calendar. A friend in a bacteriology lab used Google Calendar. Both were still doing the date math by hand, and redoing all of it whenever something slipped.

I was surprised nothing solved this, so I took it on myself. I researched the problem with working scientists, then designed and built Labmate end to end on my own: product, UI, frontend, backend and calendar integration.

Two researchers in two different labs plan their experiments in Labmate every week. Live in alpha at labmate.sh.

Problem

Wet-lab protocols are scheduled in layers. Some steps are offsets from day zero, while others are timed relative to another step, so a single protocol can mix both. Researchers I spoke with mapped these out by hand in paper calendars or Google Calendar, recalculating every date. When an experiment slipped by a day, they redid the whole plan, and a missed timepoint can cost weeks of work and materials.

Approach

I started researching in 2023 and worked with a group of five researchers, including my wife and her cohort-mates, through regular feedback and usability sessions. Three decisions shaped the product:

• Narrow hard. I could see Labmate becoming a full lab operating system. I cut the notebook, protocol builder and PI dashboards to solve the one problem I understood deeply: scheduling around a moving day zero.
• Design for more than one workflow. Early on I was designing around how my wife works. Testing showed that other protocols anchor steps differently, so I made relativity configurable for each series instead of fixed.
• Keep trying it free of friction. The first version had no login, so I could share it and iterate quickly. Real use meant syncing to people’s actual calendars, so I added accounts and Google Calendar auth. I kept a guest mode so anyone can try it without signing up.

Solution

You enter a protocol once, as offsets. Move day zero and every timepoint follows. You can avoid weekends, save runs as reusable presets, track several experiments at once and drag events around the calendar. When you push to Google Calendar, Labmate shows exactly what will change before writing anything.

Built with Next.js, React, Supabase, the Google Calendar API and Motion, with Claude and Cursor helping write the code. You can try it at labmate.sh.

Outcome

Two researchers in two different labs, immunology and bacteriology, plan their experiments in Labmate every week. By their estimate, re-planning a shifted protocol went from 20–30 minutes to about 5.

The strongest signal so far: one of them pointed their own AI agent at Labmate to extend it, adding conflict-aware scheduling across experiments with flexible gaps. They valued it enough to build on it, and we’re now designing that feature into Labmate together.