Most university projects end in a presentation. You get the grade, you move on, and the work lives in a folder you open occasionally to remind yourself you were once that ambitious.

Drop didn't do that.

It started as a final year project exploring stigma around self-injection in public spaces. Not an app, not a product, just a design research question: why do people who inject medication feel the need to hide, and what could be done about it? The project won an award. I filed it away. And then, quietly, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The gap between a university project and a shipped product is enormous, and most of what fills that gap isn't the work people imagine. It isn't the big creative decisions or the elegant solutions. It's learning to code well enough to build what you're designing. It's understanding App Store review guidelines at eleven at night. It's reading medical literature to make sure the clinical logic behind a rotation recommendation is actually sound. It's submitting an entitlement request to Apple for Critical Alerts and writing a justification that explains why an injection reminder genuinely qualifies.

None of that was in the brief.

What the decade taught me, more than anything, is that a good idea has a very long half-life if you're willing to keep returning to it. Drop at launch was a fraction of what it is now. The core insight, that rotation tracking deserved a dedicated, well-designed tool, was right from the beginning. Everything else has been refinement, iteration, and the slow accumulation of understanding that only comes from building something real and watching people actually use it.

There's also something specific about building in healthcare that changes how you think about the work. The stakes are different. The people using Drop are managing chronic conditions every day, and the app sits inside a routine that genuinely matters to their health. That's not a responsibility to be dramatic about. But it does mean that cutting corners, shipping something half-considered, or treating users as metrics rather than people, feels wrong in a way that's hard to ignore.

Ten years is a long time to stay interested in something. But the problem Drop was built to solve hasn't gone away. If anything, it's grown.