Growth Campfire #1 — Uber, Menu Next Door, Sortlist & Elium, off-script

A note from 2026: Growth Campfire was our meetup series — practitioners telling the truth about growth, on stage, without slides. The format aged well; we still believe the best growth content is honest and specific, not a polished case study. Here’s the recap of the first one.

Most growth events fail for the same reasons: they’re too theoretical, they recycle non-proprietary content, the speakers wheel out an old deck with little practical value, the sessions run long and monotonous — and everyone only shows their wins.

So we built Growth Campfire to do the opposite.

The events that actually work share three traits:

• No generic slides. The bravest speakers skip slides entirely.
• Honest practitioners, focused on educating the room — not pitching themselves.
• Room to interact — networking and real knowledge exchange, not a lecture.

Chiefs of growth, speaking without a script (or a filter)

Inspired by Native American storytelling traditions, we invited Belgian growth leaders to sit around the (metaphorical) campfire and share what actually happened — the hands-on stuff you don’t put in a case study.

The hacks

Klaas Willaert — Marketing Manager Belgium, Uber. Every Tuesday at 10 a.m., Uber runs a global sync into San Francisco with Uber managers from around the world — including candid Q&A with the CEO. Radical internal transparency as an operating system.

Nicolas Van Rymenant — CEO & Founder, Menu Next Door. Early community compounded fast: “We officially started Menu Next Door in Paris and we already have 20k people on our Facebook page.” Build the audience before you need it.

Nicolas Finet — Co-Founder & Head of Growth, Sortlist. “No one can use the same kind of hacks for their business.” His favourite: before a press push, they ran Facebook ads targeting just 10 journalists — “We wanted them to think we were a huge company already, and it worked.”

The #fuckups

The part you never see at growth events — what went wrong:

• Nicolas Finet (Sortlist): mass company emails sent with no targeting. A lesson in what not to automate.
• Nicolas Van Rymenant (Menu Next Door): a free-food promotion generated so many sign-ups it burned 10% of investor capital. Incentives work — sometimes too well.

On the reading list

The E-Myth · The Elevator Pitch · Hacking Growth · Blinkist

What we learned about running the event itself

We ran our own funnel on the event, too:

• Free events have brutal no-show rates. Charging even a small ticket price raised the commitment to show up — and let us plan the room properly.
• Ask for questions before the event. Soliciting them in advance kept the content matched to what the room actually wanted.

What we changed for next time

• Aim for 25% female speakers — helped along by the Digital Female Speakers community.
• More microphones — one per speaker, plus two roaming mics for the audience. (Small thing; big difference to interaction.)

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Growth Campfire is part of our heritage. The instinct behind it — honest, specific, practitioner-led growth — is exactly how we still work.