Notebun - it's a medical dictation and note generation app for physicians. Transcribe your patient visits into words. Transform those words into a SOAP note. Maybe create a consultation letter if you fancy. Made in 2024, in private beta, and supported by a few happy customers.

That about sums up my app. It's very simple. Here a two screenshots of it:

But the beginnings of building Notebun were however out of intrigue. At the time, I wanted to try some AI-assisted coding tools given their usefulness at prototyping new ideas. One of these ideas came from speaking with a family member who works as a physician. Let's call him Frank. At work, Frank was spending a lot of time writing documentation. From our conversation, I learned that most physicians spend more time documenting, or charting, than they do with their patients. Hearing that the first time was a shocking revelation.

So I asked, what kinds of documenting do you do? After a few rounds of back-and-forth it became clear that a bulk of Frank's work came from recording patient visits. He used a few apps to help with this , but many of them were either expensive or overly complicated. These "problems" gave me a starting point. Why not build an app for him that would be simpler to use with features he will use, at a fraction of the cost. My customer #1.

In a few days, I made the first prototype of Notebun. It was very simple with only two features. You can dictate and generate a SOAP note. We collaborated to make the generated note more to his style and a few improvements to make it more user-friendly. That was it.

With that initial prototype, he gave it a test spin at work. The more he used it, the more feedback I got. Eventually it became one of his primary tools at work, replacing his other tools. At this point, I was happy. I finally did what I set out to do: create a tool that would be useful, easy-to-use, and priced fairly (well it was free for him because he's family).

But then I thought, surely Frank can't be the only physician who's thought similar about their software tools at work: expensive and complicated to use.

So I thought why not share it with the other physicians at his clinic? Maybe they would find it useful too.

And it turns out they did!

Before long I had a few users on board. More feedback came in, more features were added and improvements were made. Months went by and usage increased. What was once a lightly used app slowly became an increasingly costly product I was supporting, and I wasn't sure where I wanted to take it. At the time there were only two options I thought about: polish the app more for commercial paid use, or shut it down. A third option didn't even come to mind.

During that time, I didn't have it in me to make it commercial. It was getting costly and I had no intentions to develop it further. I shared with Frank my plans to shut it down. To my surprise, he presented a third option. What if the other physicians are willing to pay to use Notebun as is? I would just keep it running. Frank enjoyed using Notebun and didn't want to see it go away. He'd even support the project himself if no one else did. In the next few days, he asked the other physicians at work. Without hesitation they all happily agreed to pay to keep Notebun running. Albeit with a few small changes but otherwise, Notebun has remained largely the same. No new features have been added in over a year.

So what happens now? Well, Notebun V2 is in the works. I've long wanted to improve the UI/UX - make it even simpler. Here's my progress so far:

Whether I will release Notebun more publicly later or not is to be determined.

At the very least, I can be proud of myself for releasing a product that's well used and paid! There is a sense of pride knowing that I tried. That counts for something right?