Case study · 2023
LabNinja
A lightweight protocol versioning tool for wet labs, born out of frustration with handing off SOPs as Word documents that nobody opens twice.
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Founder + Full-stack
- Status
- live
- Stack
- TypeScript, Next.js, tRPC, PostgreSQL, Prisma, Tailwind
Challenge
Wet-lab protocols drift constantly. The version everyone runs is rarely the version on the shared drive, and almost never the version cited in the eventual paper. Reproducibility suffers downstream.
Process
I shadowed three labs for a week each before writing a line of code. The pattern was the same everywhere. People wanted small, atomic edits with a clean diff, not heavyweight ELN software. I built around that. Markdown protocols, automatic versioning, and a one-click view of everything that changed since the last run.
Outcome
Adopted by 11 labs across 4 institutions in the first 8 months. Average protocol revisits per run dropped from 3.4 to 1.1.
Most lab software is built by people who have never been at the bench at 9pm trying to figure out which version of a protocol the previous student actually ran. I built LabNinja for that moment.
The decision I’m most proud of is that the tool refuses to be the source of truth for results. It only owns the protocol. Results live wherever the lab already keeps them. That constraint sounds limiting but it’s what made adoption painless. Nothing existing has to move.