Introduction
My friends and I started a bunch of projects that lead to www.dashlabs.ai. We got accepted in the Winter 21 batch of Y-Combinator.
I will document our experiences in this blog series.
The stories below are quick summaries of each stage of our pre-YC growth.
Dashboard Philippines
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents insisted I join the swaths of shoppers panic buy groceries. They thought it was the end of the world. I had no choice but to listen. I saw military checkpoints being set up and decided to plot them out. I took a screenshot of my neighborhood onGoogle Maps and annotated the checkpoints with red dots.
I shared this map with friends—and became the go-to guy for checkpoint related information.
Since checkpoint locations changed daily, I had to frequently update my Google Map screenshot. I did not scale well—so I built this webapp.
JB Tiu, one of my friends, joined me and lead the data team. He, along with a bunch of volunteers, expanded our suite of geolocated establishments from checkpoints—to banks, water refilling stations, and more.
Miguel Gemotra, a friend who interned for tabbr (www.tabbr.co), joined the team to learn more about tech.
Right before launch, Peter Martin Gomez, our high school teacher, joined in as a mascot (consultant) and made our workflows professional. (I still call him Mr. Gomez out of respect, because he is that old ;) )
He pulled in Bryan Giger and Philly Tan who, along with me, formed the core dev team of projects.
Here are some media features
At this point, we started building a team. We bought the domain Dashboard Labs / Dashlabs to start serving COVID usecases.
Laging Handa / We Health As One / COVID 19 Philippines
www.laginghanda.gov.ph / www.wehealasone.gov.ph / www.covid19.gov.ph
With Mr. Gomez’s vast network, he was able to get our foot in the door with government. We soon found ourselves in a call with Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Roque). We got the deal to build this site for the government—for free.
At that time, the government was anal about who builds what. Since Giger was not a Filipino citizen, he could not take lead here.
This is my favorite page in the project:
We plotted the spread of COVID 19 across time in the Philippines with Google Maps.
Shout out to Troy Serapio for making this happen. Troy is a grade school kid that knows how to write code. I would have more headaches without him.
Philippine Red Cross — Tech Response Team
Senator Gordon heard about us and asked us to help them out. Giger, who was free at that time, took lead for this project. He spent countless nights working with the Philippine Red Cross in digitizing our country’s patient collection form.
He and Philly Tan built the groundwork for the best COVID-19 laboratory information system in the Philippines. While I was burnt out with Laging Handa, they were burning away the useless paper documents for COVID 19.
Mr Gomez, along with Harry Paragas, and the rest of the team took care of talking to users. They made sure that all the medical technologists nationwide knew how to use our software.
As the system grew, we got involved with the Manila International Airport (NAIA or Ninoy Aquino International Airport) and Clark Airport operations. We were there when they digitized NAIA Terminal 2. We are the reason why NAIA Terminal 3 opened ahead of time.
Before our system, it took the Philippine Coast Guard 8 hours to process a flight of 250 patients. With our system, it is down to 1 hour.
After optimizing the patient data input side of the software, we optimized laboratory processes. We were able to:
- Automate the printing of laboratory worksheets with barcodes
- Integrate with the PCR machine and pull results out digitally
- Understand the test kits used and built an algorithm that analyzes and recommends COVID 19 test results
- Built a user interface for pathologists to submit results
- Automatically generate COVID 19 certificates (Thanks Adrian Serapio!) that is emailed to the patients
When we started with the Philippine Red Cross, they took 2 weeks from swab to generating certificates. Our system brought it to 7 hours.
The pathologists of the Philippine Red Cross loved our software.
Dashlabs.ai (YC W21)
www.dashlabs.ai
We are building this now. I am CTO, Bry is CEO, Martin is COO, Miguel is CXO (eXperience), and Philly is CIO (infrastructure).
I hate fancy titles, but we were advised to keep them for investor purposes.
End of this post
This is a quick glance over each part of our trip. I am learning a lot in this experience. I’ll share all my lessons in the next posts.
