A fateful day
After three months of acceleration, we are now 2 days out from Demo Day Paris, one of the most important moments of the calendar, a true milestone, that fateful day when the startups will officialy start the fund raising process.
This year, as well as Demo Day Paris, which will take place as part of the Hémicycle de la Région Ile-de-France, a Le Camping partner, we’re also bound for Berlin and London!
They are two different and exciting ecosystems that we will find out all about with special media partners: L’Atelier which has been following Le Camping from the very beginning, as well as FrenchWeb, Challenges and L’Usine Nouvelle.
Over the last three months, the startups have done all they can to get up to scratch.
Pitch again and again
Particularly over the past couple of weeks, they have worked and reworked their product cycle, from technology to users and last but not least… their pitch*, a key element if they hope to convince investors.
In The Art of Poetry, Boileau advises poets to “put their work twenty times upon the anvil“. Though the Campers’ work may have little to do with poetry, this advice applies to them: in order to obtain a quality product, it must be worked and reworked up to the very last moment.
Rejigging your speech, refining it, improving it’s articulation, always making it flow more fluidly, finding the right story to tell, the one that will hold people’s attention.
Adapted formats and specialists
Firstly the “Demos“, every Friday afternoon, at 4pm, bringing together all the Campers, and then the “No Bullshit Sessions“, Demos without, you guessed it, all the spin.
These take place with former Campers and current mentors, with two mentors who are specialists in the arena, Phil Waknell from Ideas On Stage and Annabelle Roberts from Annabelle Roberts Presentations (Vidéo Le Camping TV).
The magic of Le Camping does truly lie in these formats, which make permanent iteration a possibility. In this way, the Campers must test (and test again) their ideas on an initiated and staunch audience.
Brotherhood
Melchior Schöller, Business at Poutsch, a tool that enables users to collect public opinion, tells us all about it.
“At the end of a no-bullshit session, you feel almost as if you’ve lost a really important match… and not by much! Straight afterwards you feel the need to refocus on the next match and get things back on track very quickly.
The feedback from these sessions is precious because it comes from people who know how the process works.
The mentors and ex-Campers show us the kinds of things you need to use to convince investors. They give us the right keys to perfect your rhetoric, to make it more incisive.
They encourage us to convey our project through a story. They steer us away from bear traps that aren’t always so easy to see… to cut a long story short, they keep us moving forward!“
And the goal of all this, he adds with a nice comparison, is to “reach a certain level of fluidity that we’ve all felt when, in front of our grandmothers, we were able to flawlessly recite the poem The Fox and the Crow“!
*For the pitch, see the video from Cédric Giorgi, “Secrets of a Good Pitch”, on the “Pitch Practice” channel on Le Camping TV.