Lab Elf

I have lots of scientist friends. Doing a PhD in molecular bio has left me with a big network of fellows nerds who love sciencing as much as I do, and who know the academic research world inside out.

I have been bothering all of them for the last week, getting feedback about the Lab Elf app concept and what features would turn this into a useable tool. The input has been incredibly helpful - things I didn't think of (shared departmental equipment signup sheets - super important!), things I planned to include but wanted confirmation it was useful for other people too (push notifications for an incubation timer ending), and also feedback from people who didn't really see this as a useful app for them personally. This last one wasn't the most fun to hear, but did make sense when I thought about it.

I think that it's really connected to personality; there are some very organized people who prefer total control over their weekly schedule, and the idea of an app giving them the framework for an experimental workflow doesn't sit well. I did notice that the chemists I interviewed seemed more enthusiastic about the app idea than the biologists; in biology the feedback seemed more cautious and tended towards concern about how the app would handle situations where an experiment doesn't go as planned. (My conclusion - people who like predictability should not go into biology. But that's a discussion for another time 😅)

I am hopeful that with time, and real beta tester feedback when I make the app live, I can finetune it to maximize the user base that will find it helpful. This has been my first experience making something using actual user requests as the input, and I feel much more confident about it than with other products I've shipped just based on my own reading and background research of potential gaps.

More updates soon, hopefully launching for beta testing this week.

Wet lab research is a peculiar kind of chaos.

You're running four experiments simultaneously. One needs to incubate for two hours, one has a gel running, one is waiting for a PCR to finish, and somewhere in there you're supposed to be writing, reading papers, grading undergrad lab reports, and showing up to a department meeting you forgot about.

The researchers who thrive at this are the ones who've internalized a kind of mental Tetris. They know instinctively how to slot experiments together so dead time becomes productive time. But that skill takes years to develop, burns cognitive energy even when you have it, and completely falls apart the moment life gets complicated.

I spent years in a wet lab. I'm an organized person and it was still hard. For friends who were less obsessive about their lists and schedules, it was genuinely overwhelming, and that overhead contributed to exactly the kind of chronic stress that makes PhD programs so brutal.

When I started building software, this was one of the first problems I thought of, because I really lived it.

Enter: Lab Elf, to the rescue.

You tell it what experiments you need to run this week by typing, voice note, photo of a printed protocol, or URL. It parses the steps, understands which parts need you and which parts are just waiting, and builds you an optimized weekly schedule that intelligently interleaves everything.

While your western blot gel runs, the app already has you scheduled to grade a lab report. While your PCR runs, you're making the buffers for the enzymatic assay that's up next. Shorter gaps get filled with something useful or restoring: a task from your list, or an intentional break (a walk, a coffee with a colleague, ten deep breaths, whatever actually helps you reset).

It also handles the things that make wet lab scheduling genuinely hard: multi-day protocols that span weekends, live cells that need attention every 48 hours, shared department equipment that might already be booked. Connect your department's Google Sheet signup and Lab Elf won't schedule you on the confocal microscope when someone else has it.

The app remembers your lab's specific rules and workflows over time through a simple chat. Tell it "I never transfect cells less than 24 hours after passaging" once and it never makes that mistake again.

Hebrew and English supported. Built with researchers in Israel and the US in mind.

Currently in development, if this sounds like something you would have used during your PhD, or something you need right now, I'd love to hear from you. Looking for honest feedback, beta testers, etc.