u/FickleNebula3441

Maybe I'm doing this the dumb way, so tell me if I am.

My current process looks like this:

1. Find leads (scrape/pull a list, clean it up)

2. Dump them into some mass email sender

3. Manually check who opened / who clicked

4. Figure out who to follow up with and when

5. Write the follow-up

6. Repeat forever

Every single step is manual and it eats my whole week. By the time I've done the follow-ups the next batch of leads is already stale.
genuinely, how are you handling this? Are you living inside one tool that does most of it, are you duct-taping 4 tools together? What actually works for you and what did you give up on?

A few months ago, I started talking to doctors. The biggest pain they mentioned was documentation—writing prescriptions and consultation notes takes time they simply don't have.

So I decided to build an AI scribe.

But then I thought:

"If they're going to use my software, they'll also need appointment management, billing, patient records, admin dashboards..."

Three to four months later, I had built a mini hospital management system.

Then I asked myself one question:

What am I actually trying to validate?

The answer wasn't whether doctors wanted a new EMR.

It was much simpler:

Does an AI scribe save doctors enough time that they'll keep using it?

That realization changed everything.

Instead of asking clinics to migrate their entire workflow, I built the AI scribe as a standalone app.

Now onboarding takes minutes:

• Enter the patient's name.
• Start the consultation.

That's it.

No migration.
No replacing existing software.
No training staff.

If doctors love the AI scribe, I can build the rest later.

If they don't, I've only spent time validating one assumption instead of an entire platform.

My biggest takeaway:

An MVP isn't the smallest version of your product. It's the smallest experiment that validates your biggest assumption.

That mindset completely changed how I think about building products.

Has anyone else realized they were building Version 3 instead of an MVP?