Welcome to the wonderful world of awards. As you'll find out pretty quickly if you keep going for awards, what happened to you here is nothing more than busines

Welcome to the wonderful world of awards. As you'll find out pretty quickly if you keep going for awards, what happened to you here is nothing more than business as usual. The immense majority of awards out there are 100% bullshit and completely meaningless. The ones that rely on public votes are very obviously always worthless but the ones relying on a judging panel are, in their vast majority, just as meaningless. This is actually why entering awards is a great strategy for cash-poor startups who can't afford to pay a PR person. Anybody can win awards. In fact, I haven't personally tried that strategy, but I'm certain that you don't even need to have a product, or a business at all, to win awards. Put together a pretty looking web page for a non-existent product, write a convincing enough description, enter a few random awards and, soon-enough, you should be the proud owner of an award-winning non-existent product. There are two reasons why it's worth spending a few minutes from time to time entering awards as a startup: - Many people don't understand how awards work and believe that they actually mean something (well, they do mean something: that you're better at winning awards than your competitors). So having an award-winning product does increase your credibility with clients. - More importantly though, the reason people organise awards is generally to generate PR for themselves. So they'll generally have a PR company lined up to make sure that the award gets covered in the media. Which in turns means that the winners get free PR. And that, for a startup, is priceless.