I’m excited to announce I won!  Thank you everyone who voted for me on Twitter, left encouraging words and signed up to get notified about my new startup UseYourDeals!

I have won mentoring time with two amazing mentors who have a huge amount of experience starting companies!

• First, Rashmi Sinha, CEO and Co-founder of Slideshare
• Second, Brant Cooper, Founder and consultant to startups with a focus on customer development at Market By Numbers

This took my breath away!  There were over 100 entries into the contest.  They selected 11 winners  I applied at the tail end of the contest but thanks to my desire to be successful and your help, I won!  Now there are other prizes they’re awarding as well but I really wanted to get some one-on-one time to get help and direction with my new startup!

Last Monday I announced I was going to enter the AppSumo Lean Startup Challenge, a contest that grew out of a startup bundle and SXSW.  In order to compete I had to write a blog post about how I was running my startup without breaking the bank.

So now what?  I’m reading up everything I can in the next week on Rashmi and Brant so I can get together a list of great questions with specific outcomes to ask them.  Rashmi lives in San Francisco so that’s awesome were in the same time zone.

I’ve started looking for resources to get my startup off the ground now.

I’ve been sketching out navigation, reading over the API’s for Groupon and Foursquare and thinking of monetization strategies.

I will be applying to the Women 2.0 Founder Labs program this fall in San Francisco and received a very nice email reply from Baat on it.  I will also consider attending a Startup Weekend get the hang of rapid iterations.  Working at Zendesk certainly helped me to see just how quickly a product can be redesigned and developed so I’m feeling absolutely wonderful about this new opportunity!

Entering the contest

I like the bundles that AppSumo puts out and was already sort of thinking of the latest one called the Lean SXSW Startup bundle.  Then I saw the contest and thought back to what I saw transpire with GoKit being born at SXSW.  Mmm, should I enter a startup contest?

Me and online contests go back to 2009 when I entered my first one.  I was sooooooooo excited as it was about my local coop and I carefully prepared my reasons on why my coop rocked.
 
I could see them announcing me as the winner of the Macbook and writing up a blog post about how I’d crafted my awesome video with the help of Chuck.  Well, that didn’t happen and I was bummed.

I analyzed what could have gone wrong and how I could improve my odds for the next online contest, causing me to write up a post called, 25 Things I Learned About Online Voting Contests.  FYI, Dancing is a very popular thing to have in contests where the community picks the winner. Just like YouTube.

Over the next two years, I provided advice to several people about entering contests and prefer merit based contests over random ones. Every contest I’ve held on my blog has been merit based because while it may draw a smaller audience, you’re more likely to get people actually interested in the product and or giveaway since they have to put time and effort in.

When Dell PR approached me about doing a giveaway of one of their Vostro V130 laptops, I pitched back to them doing a merit based contest with video entries. They loved the idea and the contest went great!

And Doug won!

Submitting for the contest

Well, wait a minute, I actually needed a startup to talk about!

As you can guess, I am never in short supply of good ideas so I went into my “ideas” folder and pulled out one I’d been thinking about for a while.  Now while I could have been like, “Oh boo hoo. The contest is almost over and I have no chance of winning”, that’s not how people change the world so I sat down and made the commitment to enter.

I knew I had a good idea to run with especially since mobile was so hot in the startup field. A startup idea that people would get excited about. One that would help people keep track of their Groupon purchases before they expired and also notify them when they were close by so they could walk in and redeem their awesome coupon!  

For my entry, I blogged about my communication foundation for the startup including Google Apps, Google Voice and Grasshopper so I could be emailing, talking on the phone, doing my calendar and have a professional voice system on a startup budget.  I also talked about how I bought a logo design for under $25 and found a great landing page design for less than $10.   All a part of focusing my time and funds on the idea, not the technology needed to run the startup!

I crossed my fingers, sent in my entry and got a hashtag back the next morning, #leanvote82. I was now faced with a new challenge: asking my Twitter friends to help me win this contest. The first thing I did was clarify the rules. Did I need to include the @appsumo twitter handle in the tweets? Did I need to include a link to the voting page? As it turned out, the only requirement was tweeting the hashtag so I joked that my Twitterfam could say, “I’m going to make hot chocoloate #leanvote82″. But, that would be gaming the system so I asked everyone to do proper voting. Interestingly, I was able to think of several ways to cheat via Twitter like attaching my hashtag to a meme but again, I wanted to keep my shoelaces tied straight because that’s who I am.

And I still won!