Antoine Artillan, Corentin Jacquet, Erik Herpin and Benoit Frapiccini, 2019 graduates of TELECOM Nancy, are French Tech Tremplin Incubation 2022 laureates with their start-up ” Active ” which offers an application in the field of leisure.
Hello Antoine Artillan and congratulations on your French Tech Tremplin Incubation 2022 award! Can you tell us more about this price?
The French Tech Tremplin incubation is a French Tech program intended for start-ups that wish to “scale up”, that is to say, to start growing significantly.
The eligibility criteria are on the one hand on the viability of the project and on the other hand on social criteria that at least half of the founding team must meet.
This program represents for the winners a subsidy of €30,000, the financing of the incubation of the project within an approved incubator as well as the integration into a national promotion of the selected entrepreneurs.
This grant can finance Research & Development expenses, salaries or external product development services.
Briefly tell us about your Active startup and its evolution since the last article that TELECOM Nancy wrote.
Active offers an application that allows you to discover leisure activities around your home and simply participate in them. Walks, games, outings, visits, evenings, there is no limit to what you can offer on the app.
Our app has been available on Android since last summer and we just released it on browser, so you can access it from any device! This version will be improved every week in order to offer you the best possible experience.
Internally, we have also evolved a lot in terms of our knowledge of the market and our long-term strategy, largely thanks to our incubator, Quai Alpha.
Would you advise future graduates to embark on entrepreneurship?
Yes, yes and yes again! We hear a bit of everything, for some it’s better to start young, for others it’s better to wait to gain experience. For me, when you finish your studies is the best time to get started, because we don’t really have any constraints: it’s not the same thing at 40.
So certainly, the numbers show us that older people have a higher success rate, which makes sense, because they have the experience, the network, the knowledge of the market, etc. But starting early is the best way to acquire all these elements faster!
By launching Active, we acquired a lot of knowledge and technical skills. Indeed, we created an SAS, developed a complex and complete application from scratch, built a super solid, scalable and easily maintainable backend infrastructure, we hired apprentices and interns, participated in events, were incubated at Quai Alpha, is part of a promotion of entrepreneurs with brilliant projects, developed solutions for clients… And we are now winners of French Tech Tremplin! And all this in a year and a half despite the Covid-19 pandemic!
It is also important to understand that there is no need to have a “brilliant idea” to undertake. Entrepreneurship is above all a state of mind and a way of conceiving life, if you have this state of mind, you will end up finding a brilliant idea! But get started first, participate in hackathons or other contests, meet people from this universe, go to incubators and participate in their events, that’s where you will find your inspiration, and set up projects. Whether they are associations within the box in which you work, or even your own box, a micro-enterprise do it! You will not be able to regret what you have learned.