This is a continuation of the previous article AWS startup journey and part of a six part series for start-ups who considering entering the AWS Start-up Challenge.
I wanted to first walk you through the contest entry process in an effort to help future entrants be successful at applying for the contest. For the past two years, Amazon has used a third party service called YouNoodle to collect their entry submissions. This service works quite well and it similar to another service called Gust, which is used for entrepreneurs looking for angel or venture capital financing.
The premise is that you log onto the service and are presented with a series of questions particular to the AWS contest. For the 2012 contest, Amazon changed the questions slightly and added a few more. Aside from the generic information about you and your company, below are the key areas of the questionnaire along with some potentially valuable insights from current and past finalists on how to answer in order to get noticed.
Before you embark on your own submission, be sure to review the official AWS start-up challenge rules and understand what the judges are looking for. This article was written in the context of the 2012 AWS contest, which we do know changed slightly from the 2011 contest because we entered Deadman Heartbeat into the contest both years.
Judging Criteria
First off before you answer the questionnaire, you should understand the judging criteria because all of your answers should be geared towards addressing what the judges will be looking for.
The official rules state that your product/solution must “substantively” use the Amazon AWS services in order to qualify. This is a vague rule that (in this author’s opinion) could be used by the judges to weed out solutions that they feel do not showcase Amazon or AWS’ capabilities to their fullest. After all, it is their contest and they want to get some mileage out of it as well so why wouldn’t they want to focus on companies that use AWS to the max? “Qualified” contest entries are then judged by Amazon in the following four areas:
- Implementation and integration of the AWS services
- Your company or product’s originality and creativity
- The likelihood of long-term success and scalability of your company/solution
- Your effectiveness in addressing a need in the marketplace
In my next post of this six part series I’ll cover the AWS contest questions start ups will face and share my experience on what AWS is looking for from start ups who enter.