Products that come from
community friction
Every tool we build started as a problem we hit running North Star. We weren't looking to start a product studio — we were trying to solve our own operational pain. That constraint produces software that's specific, opinionated, and actually used.
4
Active projects
2
Live products
1
R&D residency format
Projects
Étoile
Index of AI & tech events across Belgium. AI-native community management — scraping, deduplication, and curation in one tool. Born out of the pain of maintaining a manual event calendar.
The Vessel
An atelier for intelligent machines in Antwerp. Not just a space — a product for community-as-infrastructure. Open Thursdays, workshops, and residencies.
SimpleIdea
Infrastructure for the kids hackathon and a broader stack for AI in education. Lets 8-year-olds ship working projects in an afternoon without barriers.
Aegis
Internal operations layer for North Star. Volunteer coordination, event logistics, sponsor management. We dogfood our own tools before we ship them.
How we build
Hackathon-to-product pipeline
Prototypes that solve real problems get continued post-event. Étoile's event scraping engine was a winning submission at AI Hackathon III. That team is now part of the North Star engineering orbit.
R&D Residencies
Short-form collaborative research sprints at The Vessel. Engineers from the community come together for 1–2 weeks to explore a specific technical question — robotics, multi-agent systems, applied AI. Output: prototypes, working code, and new collaborations.
Community feedback loops
We see where organizers lose time, where builders miss opportunities, where education needs better tools. That repeated contact with reality is a better product brief than any strategy deck.
Gallery
