Future Founders
I applied to the Future Founders Talent Programme a day before the deadline. Found out about it through an email, the kind that sits unopened for a few days before you finally click it. The programme is run jointly by the student enterprise teams at BCU and the University of Birmingham. Workshops, mentors, a cohort of other students, and a pitch competition at the end. I almost didn't apply. I'm glad I did.
I went in with five co-founders, a mix of BCU and UoB students who all wanted to build something. By the end of the programme it was just two of us, me and one UoB co-founder. Teams shift, and that's fine. What matters is who's still at the table when things get uncomfortable.
Three ideas in five months
We did not walk into that programme with Zentic. We did not walk in with anything close to it.
The first session set the tone pretty quickly. I told my team straight away that I was only there to win and I hoped they wanted the same, and to their credit, everyone seemed fired up about it. We had five co-founders, a shared ambition, and enough collective confidence to have a logo designed on Canva and a WhatsApp group named IgniteX before we had built a single thing or spoken to a single potential user. Looking back, that probably should have been the first warning sign.
By the second workshop we were already down to four people, and it did not take long before I told the team the idea was shit. Nobody argued. IgniteX was dead.
The idea itself was a programme designed to create more opportunities for students, which sounds meaningful until you realise that every university already runs some version of it, with years of infrastructure, institutional backing, and established relationships behind them. There was no gap for us to fill, and once that became clear, we moved on.
The second idea had more to it. A platform similar to Checkatrade, connecting customers with tradespeople in a more structured way. This one actually had legs. I built a dashboard. We spoke to potential customers. We spoke to tradesmen. We started training an AI model. There was real momentum, the kind that makes you feel like you are building something. But momentum is not the same as product-market fit, and the more we dug into the problem, the clearer it became that we were building something people did not need badly enough to change their behaviour for. We had activity, not traction. We dropped it.
That was two months into the programme, with January approaching and a March pitch day on the horizon. We had nothing.
Where Zentic came from
When you strip away two ideas and you are sitting with a pitch day closing in and nothing to show for it, the conversation changes. You stop asking what sounds good and start asking what actually matters.
We wanted to build something meaningful, something with a real person on the other end of it who needed it. The idea came from people close to us. Older adults, communities that mainstream health apps are not built for, navigating a health system that assumes you already understand how it works. Language barriers, confusing interfaces, no real support. The kind of people who get overlooked when founders are optimising for the easiest user to design for.
That became DocPocket. A multilingual health platform covering symptom tracking, appointment support, and AI-powered guidance, with full right-to-left language support for communities that need it. NHS-aligned, built for the people mainstream health tech tends to leave behind.
It became Zentic Health after a mentor meeting. DocPocket was already taken and we did not like the name anyway, so the rebrand was easy. The idea was the important part.
The pitch
We won.
One of the judges described us as the clear winners and told us directly to take it forwards, adding it had strong commercial potential. Going from no idea in January to a room full of experienced people believing in what you had built by March was the kind of validation that is hard to manufacture.
A few months later I pitched Zentic again at BCU's Innovation Fest as part of the Big Idea pitch competition. We won first place and a cash prize. They also gave me flowers, which I gave to my mum.
Where Zentic is now
Still active. Currently in the market research stage, doing that work properly before building more. The lesson from the second idea was a simple one: moving fast without validation is just moving in the wrong direction faster. We are not making that mistake again.
What I would tell myself at the start
Two things.
Get ready to be uncomfortable. The programme will push you to kill ideas you like, defend ideas you are not sure about, and have honest conversations about whether what you are building actually solves anything. That discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the point.
And start enjoying research, not the reading kind, the talking to real people kind. Almost every answer we needed was sitting in a conversation we had not had yet. The sooner you internalise that, the better the work gets.
Zentic Health is currently in the market research stage. If you work in health access, multilingual design, or NHS-aligned products and want to talk, get in touch.