E07 - 1LIMS - How one founder turned lab data chaos into a scalable solution

Philipp Osterwalder spent more than 20 years in quality control, quality assurance and R&D across pharma and food production. In pharma, quality data was structured, traceable and connected. In food and beverage, he kept seeing the opposite: paper forms, Excel files, broken handovers and six-week audit preparations. That gap became 1LIMS. In this episode, Philipp breaks down how he built a bootstrapped laboratory software company in one of the least flashy B2B markets: quality control labs. He shares how 1LIMS landed its first customer with only a clickable prototype, why the team stopped customizing software around messy processes, and what changed when they finally started listening to the lab technicians using the product every day. If you are building B2B SaaS, selling into operational teams, or trying to bring AI into a legacy workflow, this one is for you. Key lessons from this episode: Why pharma-grade quality control exposed a huge gap in food and beverage labs How 1LIMS got its first customer with a clickable prototype and full transparency Why a fast onboarding matters when you are changing software during live operations The hidden cost of paper, Excel and manual data handling in quality control teams Why 1LIMS stopped adapting software to messy customer processes and started auditing workflows first The mistake of listening to buyers instead of the people using the product every day Why AI only becomes useful after the basics are clean: structured, traceable and reliable data The shift from reactive quality control to predictive quality prevention Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 02:00 From pharma to food 04:30 Paper and Excel pain 06:00 Building the first prototype 08:00 Fast onboarding 10:30 Measuring efficiency 12:00 Lean Six Sigma assessment 14:00 AI for predictive QC 16:30 Early product lessons 20:00 Solving adoption issues 22:30 Growing a global team 24:00 AI trends and recipes 26:00 Fixing feature misalignment 28:00 Manufacturing intelligence 30:00 Founder advice 32:00 What is next for 1LIMS Resources & Links: Philipp Osterwalder   / philipp-osterwalder   1LIMS https://www.1lims.com/ 1LIMS on LinkedIn   / 1lims   Padrig Guillard   / padrig-guillard