Coordinating Prenatal and Postnatal Care by Hand
Problem
Prenatal and postnatal care in India is scattered across specialists, OB-GYNs, nutritionists, fitness instructors, who almost never talk to each other, leaving mothers to piece their own care together. There was no infrastructure to test whether a coordinated model could actually work, and no budget to build one. Whatever I tested had to run on tools that already existed.
Constraint
This was self-funded, built alongside a full time graduate program, with no engineering team and no money for custom software. The whole thing had to run through a channel mothers and providers already used every day, so I could start testing immediately.
The manual coordination wasn't a placeholder for an app. It was the actual product, and proving it by hand was the only way to know if building software around it was even worth doing.
Approach
I onboarded a small group of providers, 4 OB-GYNs, 2 nutritionists, and 2 prenatal fitness instructors, and put together a subscription model bundling virtual consultations, nutrition guidance, and fitness support. I ran the entire booking and scheduling process myself, by hand, through WhatsApp, coordinating appointments and follow ups directly with 23 mothers. There was no app, no backend, no team.
Outcome
23 mothers got coordinated prenatal and postnatal care through a panel of 8 providers, run entirely through manual chat. It paused in March 2021, a deliberate stop: keeping it going meant more time and money than I had once student loans and a second master's degree needed my full attention.