Who are the people that work and study at TU? Meet master’s student Philip van den Heuvel, who is part of a team that looks at entrepreneurship from a different perspective.
“At the end of the last academic year, a few of us who had worked together at De Kleine Consultant believed there was something missing in Delft for ambitious students who want to get actual entrepreneurial experience. You can only get into YesDelft if you already have a proven idea and a committed team. In order to bridge the gap, we founded Centr, which is an abbreviation for collective entrepreneurs.
In February, we started with a group of students and the belief that people are more important than the actual idea. Because once you have a good team, good ideas can be created with each other and by talking to people. We are currently a diverse team of six including people from electrical engineering, computer science, industrial design and one guy who studies econometrics in Amsterdam. At Centr we are working on different projects as a team. And because of the collective nature of the team, we are able to help each other. We are currently working on two start-ups called Breeze and MOK, but we are also looking into corporate venturing.
I am mostly working on Breeze, which is a dating platform. The idea originates from the fact that a lot of people probably want to date more often. Of course, you can meet people at parties or bars. Or you can go on apps like Tinder or happn, but we think the huge flaw of those apps is that their incentive is not actually to send you on a date. They just want to have you on the app and get you to swipe through the people on their platform. We want to help people actually arrange that first date. For now, it’s targeted at students here in Delft and in Leiden.
The idea is that we cut the chat function out of the app, so you don’t communicate with each other until you actually go on the date. Each week you get a limited number of handpicked profiles from which you can choose a match. If you both choose each other, we set up the date. Our business model is that we are partnering with restaurants and bars and we get a small amount of money when we send dates there. Therefore, we only make money when people actually go on the date.
We started by making a few pdf profiles of some of our friends and interviewing random people within the industrial design faculty to see if they would want to go on a date based on a profile without chatting. If they said yes, we would show the profiles and actually arrange a date with that person. We were just testing our idea, but from that we were able to set up our first date. A lot of people are very open to talk about your ideas here so that’s very useful.
For me this is an experience about learning what being an entrepreneur is really like at a time of life when you can still take limited risks. It’s about learning about entrepreneurship by starting something rather than reading and hearing about it.”
Want to be featured in Humans of TU Delft? Or do you know someone with a good story to tell? Send us an e-mail at humansoftudelft@gmail.com
Heather Montague / Freelance writer
Comments are closed.