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?
