Private Coronavirus Tests
privatecoronavirustests.com was a direct-to-consumer COVID-19 testing service I built with a GP friend I'd met during my time at London Doctors Clinic. He had access to lab capacity through London Medical Laboratory; I had the digital and operations side. We put the first version together over two weekends in 2020, expecting it to run for maybe a month while everyone figured out what was happening. It ran for over two years.
What it did
We offered the full range of accredited tests that mattered through each phase of the pandemic — PCR, lateral flow, antibody, fit-to-fly — across 20+ in-person testing locations around the UK, plus a postal service for people who couldn't come in.
The consumer side of the business was busy enough that several locations needed police queue management on the worst days. The B2B side was busier. We ended up running the testing programmes for Sky, Apple, Eurostar, and a long list of film and TV productions that had to keep cast, crew and travelling staff tested to keep working through the lockdowns and travel restrictions.
The technical bit
What started as a marketing site with a checkout flow grew into a serious bit of infrastructure. By the end we were integrating with lab LIMS systems, courier and logistics platforms, third-party occupational-health providers, government reporting feeds and dozens of bespoke client systems on the corporate side. Every integration had a sharp deadline because the rules around travel, isolation and testing were changing every few weeks — what was true a fortnight ago was no longer true, and the build had to keep up.
What it taught me
That you can build a real business in a weekend if the moment is right and you have the right partner. That what looks like a one-month side project can absorb two years of your life when the world changes around it. And that running anything in a market governed by weekly government announcements is exhilarating, exhausting, and — when free testing eventually wound down and demand evaporated more or less overnight — surprisingly easy to walk away from.