Vet Mkononi
Farmers and pet owners had no single place to find a nearby vet, and vets were recording farm visits in notebooks. We built one app for both sides of that problem, starting with the vet.
- Role
- Product designer
- Year
- 2024
- Tools
- Figma, Flutter
The problem
When farmers and pet owners need medical care for their animals, they scramble online to find a vet. There is no single place to check for vets nearby.
The same is true for vets. When they visit farms or homes, records get drafted in a book or a notes app, so it’s hard to pull a clean report across multiple visits.
Is it worth solving?
I had many conversations with Joseph Nyugo, the founder of Vet Mkononi, about the problem. His time with veterinarians gave us a solid starting point. We decided to tackle both sides: a way for vets to record visits digitally, and a place for customers to find vet services in their region.
Deciding on the MVP
It’s easy to try to ship everything at once. We chose to focus on the vet app first: test it, gather feedback, improve it, and only then expand into a marketplace where customers could book vets. That step-by-step approach turned out to be a game-changer.
We worked through three questions:
- The user. Who are we building for?
- The needs. What problems are they facing?
- What can ship? What’s feasible in phase one?
We chose Flutter so both Android and iOS users could use the app from day one.
Branding
The product started life as Mvet. We renamed it Vet Mkononi, “vet in hand”, to emphasise easy access to vet services across Kenya.
Product design
Vets needed a digital way to record farm visits, so the core journey stayed deliberately small:
- Sign up
- Add livestock details
- Record visits
Any upgrades would come straight from user feedback after launch. Later we opened the app to farmers and pet owners, who can now choose vets and services, track visits and payments, and keep milk records.
