For those who missed the TechStars announcement, here's how we will find participants:

Why are we doing Startup Madness?

The short answer is that we wanted to provide an opportunity for "under the radar" startups to get some much-needed attention from early adopters and potential investors.

We're fortunate at This or That to have the resources to experiment with our product and marketing until we find ways to delight our current users, efficiently find new users, and ultimately produce a viable business. On the other hand, we know that there are many startups with great ideas and talented founders who struggle to get any attention (or money) at all. I'll apologize to those whose bubble I'm about to burst, but building a great product does not mean that users or tech writers beat a path to your door. As Venture Capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson wrote today, the bread and butter for influential tech sites like TechMeme is not covering great new startups - it's rumors about Apple and Facebook or the latest new feature in Gmail. Like it or not, that's what many blog readers and mainstream reports are looking for, so that's what everyone provides.

Our hope is that Startup Madness will give some much needed love to great teams who are executing against useful or truly interesting products. While the participants will be mostly focused on getting votes for themselves, we believe this will also give significant attention to all of the other participants. We noticed this effect during our two previous tournaments (Song of the Year and Movie of the Year). Most voters came into the site excited to vote for one artist (for most it was to <3 our winner Enrique) but stayed around to vote on the other contests as well. We hope to see that same effect in this tournament.

If you know of any great startups out there (including yours), make sure you nominate them quickly, there's less than a week to go!