1) Forget about it, chances are you suck at doing diligence and there is a startup doing EXACTLY what you are doing. If not, there are a dozen other startups do

1) Forget about it, chances are you suck at doing diligence and there is a startup doing EXACTLY what you are doing. If not, there are a dozen other startups doing the same exact thing. If not, the second you go live someone will start copying you anyways. 2) Publicity, you think you just throw up a page and you suddenly get a million users? TC50 will get you that first million or so users to try your thing out, and who knows maybe some of them will come back. Then a lot of other publications tend to copy paste ideas, so if you get covered by Techcrunch for TC50, you'll get a few dozen other mainstream articles to cover you. I'd say the main con for techcrunch 50, is that there are 50 other startups being covered at the same time. So while you may have some awesome product, it will get ignored since everyone will be covering and talking about the new Mint.