Margn took part of the Mini Seedcamp Prague held in October 2011. 20 best applicants were invited from all over the Europe. Margn didn’t succeed but the trip was really successful – a lot of feedback, experiences, contacts and many rewards and discounts from Seedcamp partners whose services we already use.
Seedcamp might be the most popular and prestigious startup accelerator in Europe. It helds many events all over Europe where everyone can apply. 20 best teams are invited to the final event and some few (usually one or two) get seed funding 50 000 EUR. Seedcamp has been the boost for many companies like Erply. It is worth to mention that Estonians are pretty good “Seedcampers” as six companies with Estonian background have got their seed funding from Seedcamp: Facebook campaign tool Campalyst, POS and inventory management software Erply, engineers Facebook GrabCad, in line waiting remover Qminder, sports manager Sportlyzer and currency exchange tool TransferWise.
Margn participated in Mini Seedcamp Prague, held in 20th of October 2011. To take part in the event, we took car to get to Prague, spending the first night in Warsaw.
The main event started quite early – 9 am. At first there were some presentations and then came the pitches, for which every team had three minutes. As we had practiced for it for quite many times, the timing wasn’t problem for us.
After pitching there were 3*45 minutes sitting with various mentors. Every one of those minutes were really valuable giving a lot of more concrete target for developing and marketing Margn. To sum up, nothing really strategical were introduced. But since those sessions Margn is much more concrete with its activities – focusing much more to Estonia in the beginning.
After mentoring sessions everyone could enjoy the free meeting in Prague old town.
Margn wasn’t invited to investment interview but the feedback and contacts were already worth participating. Of course you can’t underestimate the beauty of Prague.
Here are Taavi and Sigmar after mentoring sessions:
What to we recommend to those, who are thinking of applying to Seedcamp? As there is no point of saying what others are already saying, here are some previous postings:
- Pipedrive experience - http://blog.pipedrive.com/post/5570789779/lessons-learned-from-y-combinator-and-seedcamp-volume-on
- WhoAPI experience: http://whoapi.com/blog/292/whoapi-seedcamp-in-prague/
- Touchqode experience: http://touchqode.com/blog/014_seedcamp_experience.htm
- Apply, apply, apply. If you are not invited to one event, try the another one.
- Practice your pitch. We did it more than 20 times, but still it is sure that it wasn’t enough.
- Show your pitch to those, who are experienced in it. They ask the very right questions that you need to answer before going on a stage.
- If you are invited to main event don’t hesitate participating. If the value of feedback and contacts isn’t enough, all Seedcamp finalists got some discounts from Seedcamp partners that were much more valuable than the costs of trip.
- Make t-shirts with your own message. There are 19 more teams in the main event and you need to be remembered.
- Don’t underestimate the value of older experiences. Getting funded in these events is never the cause of luck.