On Monday I attended Amazon’s Web Services user group meeting in Boston. The event was attended by at least 50 startups (several of whom had pretty cool businesses), and a few venture capitalists as well. While I was a little disappointed by the lack of detail on the Amazon product road map that was presented, I did find the event useful. In particular, Amazon announced a new contest for startups using Amazon’s Web Services. The AWS Startup Challenge will award cash and web service credits to the winners. I’d encourage any startups using the Amazon platform to check out the rules and prizes.
These sorts of contests are good for startups for several reasons:
- The money – benefits are pretty obvious
- Publicity – the power of some of the high profile “contest-type” events is huge. Demo, Y-Combinator, Seedcamp, etc. all provide some real street cred. This can help with online marketing, such as driving potential customers to your site. Winning these contests also provides explicit endorsement by the contest sponsor, which can help with sign up rates – i.e. the concept in consumer behavior whereby the potential customer can be positively inclined to make a purchasing decision based on an endorsement or recommendation by a “trusted” source.
- Connections – getting to know senior people at Amazon, or interacting with other founders in the finals of these sorts of competitions can prove to be very valuable. Strategic advice, introductions, etc can all be worthwhile.
- Learning – Your startup can get critiques from business people, and you can learn what has and hasn’t worked in similar industries.
- More money - I’ve heard that venture capitalists sometimes use the finalist lists as means of finding companies to potentially invest in…
- Glory! – Rocky fought for glory, so can you!
Am I forgetting any obvious ones?
September 24th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Here are a few that I have some personal experience with Healy:
1. Market Validation – If the award is a people choice award, then your potential customers are saying they like your product, they see that a need is being addressed and that they are willing to use it.
2. Partnerships – Awards will help you to a certain extent in making the sale when you are trying to establish partnerships. Potential partners are looking for market validation and these awards act as proxies. The more you win, the easier it gets to create partnerships. These partners could be distributors, technology partners, co-marketers, resellers and service partners.
3. Marketing – You can now market your product as an award-winning product. People prefer award winning products over those that did not. The fact that people read more books featured on NY Times bestsellers list is a testament to this.