Redherring, the US tech startup magazine (with European location in Zurich) announced the winners of its Redherring Europe award. Awards are an excellent way to market yourself, both for the startups nominated and even more so for the ones who are among the winners and of course for Redherring itself. The magazine also makes a lot of money inviting startups and venture capitalists and a few service providers to this yearly event; this year they gathered in the European hotspot Malta. Attendance is not cheap. Companies pay 2350 EUR per person (1800 EUR for secondaries) and are then allowed to attend a few days of panel discussions and meet the startups, VCs and a few service providers.

Now all good in theory - watching the Mediterranean Sea over a nice candlelight dinner, listening to the waves and feeling the nice warm breeze (we have not attended this event so this here is pure fiction) - but what do things look like in the morning with a little headache from the red wine the night before?

First of all, every single Redherring 100 winner will display prominently on their home page the Redherring winner logo. Nearly all of them will write a press release saying how proud they are to be a Redherring Winner. And surely they can be proud since they made it to the top 100 startups in Europe, where such celebrities like Skype, eBay and also Google once were winners (the last two in the US of course). So it is a nice PR event for everyone and of course in particular for Redherring (nothing wrong about that, everyone needs to market themselves and that is totally legitimate). Now comes my point. What would someone like me or, as I am already convinced, a potential client (let's assume the startup is aiming to sell to large clients, not all do but most of them) think about seeing a Redherring 100 logo on their website?

• there is not much relevant news that they can talk about so they pay to go to an event where they get an award with 99 others
• not having much to tell is a clear sign of an early stage startup with little company and product history
• startups are a high risk to buy from for established companies since if things don't work out people expose themself to internal critique, (buying big blue IBM is always safe)

So in short, instead of trying to hide their immaturity and appear a safe place to buy from, all of them even pronounce their lack of history and tell everyone about it. A startup should try to spend all their efforts and money to win good reference clients. Potentially even "buy" them by offering things for very cheap or low cost so that they can overcome the above mentioned hesitation and can win other key accounts who then pay the normal price. A BIG PR splash then is what should be done. In general we like Redherring as they are one of the very few survivors in the VC, startup magazine scene (their European counterpart, Tornado Insider, had to shut down long time ago) but that does not mean we think everything they do is cool. One purpose of the Redherring event is of course that VCs and startups can meet at one place, get to know each other and then possibly find each other. That is a highly worthwhile thing and could be achieved even without an award. Redherring would disagree I am sure...