Labmate

Context

My wife works in research and brought up many frustrations herself and her teams experience. Seeing her struggles sparked my interest, and after further investigation, I identified a real market opportunity.

Business opportunity

Planning and managing experiments at scale is a challenge for research organizations.

There are plenty of scheduling, and note-taking, and project management tools on the market, but none specifically address the specialized needs of the academic and government scientific community.

Tools such as Notion require high levels of configuration and training to use for data/procedure/documentation. Tools like google calendar lack robust staggered scheduling that is required for projects with multiple time-points.

Digging into the problem

Why aren’t researchers using existing project management apps like Asana, Monday.com, JIRA, etc?

Most of them are complicated to configure in a way that supports the specific needs of science. They provide general solutions for tech/business problems, but not well suited or easily configurable to address the needs of conducting research.

The demographic that needs this solution doesn’t know how to or want to spend time building templates and processes to manage their work in another app.

The competitors I’ve found in the space are targeting industry research, which has vastly different goals than academia and government work, where the real gap seems to be.

Our principles

Built for scientists - Scientific software tools should be built with the scientist in mind. Making scientists productive is more important than keeping managers happy.

It works out-of-the-box - Other project management solutions are not built for science. They are too flexible because they’re made to be configured, leading to inconsistency and errors. Labmate works out-of-the-box so you can focus on what you do best.

Aim for clarity - Don’t add unnecessary features, and keep the interface simple. Don’t invent terms, don’t add complexity where it didn’t exist before. Make scientists’ lives easier.

Research snippets