Boot Camp StartupSouth4: DAY1

For the short listed startups that will be pitching today marked the beginning of this years Startup South conference. Starting with a boot camp to prepare them for the pitching exercise.

The boot camp started today with two sessions: the first on story telling and the second on Design Thinking.

The first session which was taken by Mr. Joel Amawhe of MyPadi.ng was centered on story telling. In this session he highlighted the things makes for a memorable pitch. Things like hitting the emotional cord of your audience, being congruent and believable etc. To show practically what he meant, he asked all the startup team leads to step out and do an impromptu pitch.

The impromptu pitches today gave the teams a taste of what is coming in the subsequent days. After comments and corrections by the coordinator, the session ended gently to give way for the second session.

The second session which was taken by Mr. Samson Aligba. His session which was centered on design thinking was focused on getting the startup teams to re examine their approaches to problem solving and organized their method of communicating their value to their audience in order to build a strong brand identity.

For him the process of design thinking starts with empathy, goes through prototyping and ends with testing. This session was really interesting and really helped the teams stretch their thought processes.

Some of the teams arriving today, were taken through these processes of story telling and design thinking to help them assess their level of readiness for the investor pitching session which is coming soon as part of the conference.