UNICO: My experience and what it left me

UNICO was born out of a necessity, not just the need to create a product that someone would want to use, also because in the end no one actually used it, but to bring together six university students who up to that point had worked separately and make them collaborate toward a single goal.

The initial idea

Summer 2024, I needed a summer project. At the time AI was heavily hyped and everyone wanted to integrate it into their company, so I came up with an idea: a dashboard where anyone could create their own “Custom GPTs”, but for all providers (Gemini, Claude, etc.), and then use them to create ad hoc integrations for groups of companies. For example, an extension that connected the “Custom GPT” to a Google account to read emails, create calendar events and, in general, manage Google Workspace. It wasn’t very scalable as an initial project, but I liked it. After all, it was summer, I was looking for my web tech stack and experimenting with new technologies. One day, almost as a joke, I showed it to my boss and he liked the project, saying only that he wouldn’t know where to place it as it was at the time.

The meeting that changed everything

September 2024, I was in Berlin on vacation and I received a message from a coursemate of mine, Alessandro (I’ll leave out his last name for privacy). I don’t remember exactly what that message said or what it was about, probably something related to exams. We had known each other for a short time, but I remember he told me he couldn’t wait to see me again at university. At the time I wasn’t doing very well, I had many exams behind me and I wasn’t attending classes much. I had just spent my second year of university in a study room trying to pass Calculus 1, so meeting new people felt good. We first met in class, then at the university café, where he introduced me to the others: Simo, Pau, Cecco and Dan. In reality there were more of us, but they are the core members of UNICO.

The birth of the group

As the first semester went by, we started getting to know each other better. Each of them had a completely different personality and I shared something in common with all of them.

Alessandro had a deep understanding of every topic he talked about, we thought the same way on many subjects and I was impressed by how consistent he was. He didn’t yet know whether computer science would be his future, but despite that he worked on his projects day and night.
Simo wanted to build a group, be around people, do something truly personal and commit to a common goal. Studying wasn’t a problem for him, so he had plenty of time to focus on something outside university and he was very interested in computer science.
Pau and Cecco were inseparable. Along with me, they were the only ones who were already working and they were complementary: Pau had a good eye and Cecco was methodical and precise. With them, interfaces became clean and complete.
Dan always had new ideas, not necessarily brilliant ones. He was one of those people who know how to program and therefore program whatever they want, even if it’s useful to no one. He had excellent back-end skills and strong knowledge of low-level languages.

It was clear that once the idea was validated, I would have to try to involve them. Not everyone agreed immediately: at first it was just me, Ale and Simo working on it, then Pau and Cecco joined, and finally Dan, although he preferred working on UNICO’s side projects rather than directly on the dashboard.

Building together

We started working on it almost every day. In the evenings we worked on it on Discord and in the mornings we met at university to deploy using the terrible Wi-Fi of the university café. We went to lectures only because half of us listened and took notes, while the other half fixed bugs and implemented new features. This went on for almost a year. For me, studying had taken a back seat, but surprisingly I was improving. I passed all the exams I had planned to take in 2025, even though the time I spent studying had decreased significantly. A sign that I was using my time better and that I was motivated to always do better, because I knew we had a common goal and we were working to achieve it.

After talking about it further with my boss, there was a change in direction: we started focusing on making the dashboard the central hub of everything, no external integrations. We wanted a single place where users could create, manage and use their agents, also connecting them to the company’s proprietary APIs. This led us to rewrite a large part of the code, but we knew the path we were taking was the right one. At a time when major providers were focusing on integrating AI through human systems like browsers and websites, we were going through APIs, which are much faster and better suited for agentic workflows. Maybe the idea was there, but we weren’t being understood.

When the product is not enough

September 2025, UNICO was basically ready, all that was left was to sell it. Being all programmers, we thought it would be useful to have a complete product before selling it, letting the application speak for itself, but that wasn’t the case. First of all, I had no sales experience, so I turned to my boss and he gave me a lot of useful advice. Unfortunately, the other team members couldn’t help me, they didn’t know where to start. I thought: “Come on, I can handle this on my own, the idea is there, the product too, things are in our favor.” Unfortunately, the train had somewhat already passed. The hype around AI was flattening out and none of the companies we spoke with found a valuable use for UNICO. We presented some ideas or customized proposals, but it was as if:

The platform was too technical to explain. Maybe I was taking average knowledge for granted, but I repeatedly found it difficult to make even the most competent people understand the real value of UNICO, namely the ability to integrate any product with AI, something no provider was doing at the time.
I was doing everything in UNICO. That wasn’t true, the others had helped me a lot, but despite that I was the one coming up with new ideas, often the one implementing them and the one presenting and interfacing with clients. Many times the others came with me to meetings, but they said little or nothing.

With these structural issues, along with other communication and collaboration problems, UNICO’s days were numbered.

Beyond UNICO

Even though the project seemed to be at a dead end, we kept trying. We attended a few events, including Orizzonti Digitali in Perugia and the Maker Faire in Rome, both as visitors and not as guests. These experiences led to some interesting contacts with whom we are still collaborating today, but nothing came of it, the dashboard never went anywhere. As the winter exam session and the Christmas holidays approached, we mutually agreed not to completely throw the project away, but to put it on hold, at least the dashboard, and look for something new. At the moment, we are not working on anything together.

What remains

This project and my coursemates taught me a lot, things that will certainly be useful to me in the future, but it wasn’t just a way to learn, as many believe. It literally saved my university career. By getting to know my group, I was able to interact for the first time with people who shared my passions and were living the same situations as me. By spending almost all my time with them, I completely changed my approach to studying. Now I feel calmer and more confident in myself and in what I want to do. It wasn’t a failure, on the contrary, it was the beginning of something. A spark that didn’t turn into fire, but that still changed me deeply. Thank you.