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If you've been following along, we've finally reached the point where I secured the funding that allowed me to get started! But that was only the beginning. The next step was validation. Building a startup takes much more than wanting to help people or designing something useful. It means building a business. It involves people, responsibilities, planning, and, above all, accepting that you can't rely solely on your intuition. You can't assume that because you believe in your

OnCue began as my master’s thesis in Integrated Product Design at TU Delft, a project made possible through a collaboration with ParkinsonNederland, a foundation that raises funds and invests in the fight against Parkinson’s disease. They were the ones who identified a common challenge for people living with Parkinson’s: interacting with computers, and more specifically, with keyboards. An object that most of us use almost every day without thinking about it can become a real

When I decided to continue developing OnCue beyond graduation, I found so many people willing to give me advice, have a chat or a coffee with me, and see how they could help me. One of those moments happened during a workshop at the TU Delft Impact Contest. After I gave my pitch, one of the judges came up to me and we talked about the challenge of funding an early-stage project. He mentioned a few opportunities that could potentially be a good fit. A day later, he took the ti

I found myself becoming a finalist in the TU Delft Impact Contest, a student competition designed to help turn an idea into a startup. Being a finalist meant one thing to me: the idea made sense. Not only to me, but also to the people who had selected me to move forward. Then came the grand finale: pitching on stage, full of nerves and determination to do well. But there was no win. The €10.000 prize I had been holding on to as a possible way forward suddenly disappeared. I h

April was all about connections and creating opportunities to show OnCue to people, raise awareness, and gather feedback. OnCue was presented at the Medical Delta Conference in Delft, and at Milan Design Week to an international audience. That meant preparing flyers and business cards, designing the exhibition setup, adjusting the prototype for different interactions, booking a flight back to Italy from the Netherlands, and packing a suitcase as full as my excitement to tell

After graduating, it was time to find a job, or at least, that was what I thought. Six months earlier, before starting my thesis and working on improving computer interaction for people with Parkinson’s, I had been certain about what I wanted to do: work at a design agency. But during my thesis, and especially once it was finished, I started to feel that I would struggle to simply put the project in a box and move on. Who would take responsibility for this problem after me? M