So Phil and I are just back from Mini Seedcamp London. What a blast!
We had a great time, got through to the final 11, and we are nowwaiting to hear if we made it into the full Seedcamp week in London in September!
To give a run down of the whole week for us, it went something like this:
Monday
Got into the office and decided on 10 slide framework, and worked with Sarah from IfLooksCouldKill on how we could communicate our 10 points with graphics.
Then we had to run for the train, hoping to get a table and be able to work on our pitch over the 4 hour journey, which we figured would be plenty of time. We did not however anticipate sitting next to a hen party returning home on a very crowded train with virtually non existent wifi.
We got to London with our thoughts were still all over the place, and Sarah still perfecting our illustrations in Edinburgh. We knew Seedcamp were doing some pitch training that evening, so we made our way from Kings Cross to UCL.
I thought there may be some people knocking about – arriving from other parts of the world. We’d leave our stuff – grab some food and practice our pitch over dinner and then come back and present it. However, we found the Seedcamp guys in a lecture theatre, walked in the door, and before I had time to grab Phil and say “lets not walk into that room” they said: “hey guys – you’re up next”.
So we fired up our ugly outline slides and probably gave one of the worst pitches in the history of Seedcamp. They then proceeded to tear into us with “constructive” criticism. It was actually really helpful, and the quality of the people feeding back was actually inspiring, so we were both so glad that we went through with it. It was such a great workshop for us and we both realised we were going to have to step up our game the next day.
We then went and found some food in the amazing Planet Organic (which I returned to 3 times during our stay), had some great food, and worked into the night on our new presentation. We headed to our hosts and stayed up till about midnight practising and trying to learn it off by heart.
Tuesday
We arrived at UCL at about 9.00 and thankfully had about 20 minutes to practice it over the coffee time.
We really wanted to tell a story, and make sure the story flowed throughout the whole presentation, rather than just regurgitate facts. The best way we found to practice together was to look at the illustration – and really quickly say the 2 or 3 key words for each 30 second slide. This meant we both new what we wanted to say really well, and the only thing we had to work on was looking really passionate – we both suffer from looking a bit uninterested even when we are really excited.
The pitch went really well. In fact – it was a real rush to be able to speak to the Seedcamp crowd, and present our ideas. Judging from some of the tweets – people liked what we had to say, and a few folks told us we had the nicest slides!
Here are our slides
More to come about the rest of the day and our thoughts on Seedcamp and what we learned…
Float covered in the Guardian
Fred Wilson writes about Seedcamp
Techcrunch covers the 2010 Mini Seedcamp London Teams
Hi mate, this looks awesome. I have passed your blog to Billy Queen a church leader in Bridgeton who is looking into setting up a seed-fund and mentoring porgramme for new business start-ups in the East End of Glasgow, with suport from Paul Thompson.
Thanks Paul…I’d love to see something like that happen. There is an event called Startup Weekend happening in Glasgow 27-29 August. So that could be a good thing to hook in with…