A few weeks ago VentureBeat emailed to tell me that AppStoreHQ had been selected as one of seven finalists for the Best Services Startup competition at their upcoming MobileBeat show. More than 100 companies had applied for the competition, so I was stoked to get picked but had no real expectation of winning. We just started AppStoreHQ this spring, and we were stacked up against much more established (and better funded) entrants. But I figured it would be good exposure for us, so I bought a plane ticket and threw together a deck (embedded below).
The format for the competition was a two-minute pitch, followed by questions from a five-member expert panel. At the end of the seven pitches, the panelists would confer and vote on a winner. The panel included Bob Borchers (Opus Capital), Anand Iyer (Microsoft), Stephan Noll (T-Mobile Ventures), Nagraj Kashyap (Qualcomm Ventures), and Greg Tarr (Cross Pacific Capital). I hadn’t fully grokked how short two minutes of talk time was until the flight down, when I first had a chance to practice. I felt like I had hardly opened my mouth when I got the time signal and had to wrap up.
My personal pick for the winning pitch was Urban Airship, a platform provider for push and in-app transaction services enabled by the v3.0 iPhone SDK. They had timed their release perfectly with the launch of 3.0, releasing in association with a few leading iPhone app publishers. So I was amazed when Matt Marshall announced AppStoreHQ as the judges’ pick.
Unfortunately, there was no cash prize for winning, but the show was a great experience and the win was a nice surprise. Partly as a result of the win, AppStoreHQ has a small but influential group of new admirers, and I have renewed faith in the power of just showing up.