GoDaddy and Audience Awards are teaming up this winter to host the “Small Business Stories” video contest, which will award a total of $21,500 to ten innovators around the world.
GoDaddy, one of Arizona’s top tech companies and the world’s largest cloud platform for small businesses, has always been invested in Phoenix-area entrepreneurship. Now they’re going global by partnering with Audience Awards, a content sourcing platform that helps connect filmmakers with great ideas.
Small Business Stories focuses on just that—the stories behind local businesses and the people who started them. The idea behind the contest is to highlight the hard work, passion, and tears that go into small businesses behind the scenes. Entrepreneurship is too often portrayed as glamorous and linear, but Small Business Stories is removing the “pretty lighting and polish” to expose the real struggles and triumphs of owning a business.
In order to enter, founders will need to turn their cameras on their businesses, their daily lives, and the communities that make it all possible. “Documentaries” should be one or two minutes long and should get to the heart of their respective businesses: why the business was started, what its greatest struggles are, what keeps them going, and more. GoDaddy and Audience Awards say not to worry about getting the perfect angle or soft lighting; instead, entrants should focus on sharing their stories, no matter how raw. (You can read the rest of the contest rules here.)
Submissions close on Monday, February 13. After that, people will be able to vote online for the documentaries they loved the most. A panel of industry judges will go through the films as well. The top ten audience-voted documentaries, as well as the top ten judge-selected documentaries, will move on to the finals round, where they’ll be judged by a panel of GoDaddy jurors.
A total of ten small businesses will win the Small Business Stories contest. First place receives $10,000 in cash; second place receives $3,000; third place receives $1,500. Seven honorable mentions will receive $1,000 each. Every one of the top ten businesses will receive bragging rights.
Of course, we at TechAZ are cheering on any and all Arizona small businesses that enter. If you’re interested in submitting a documentary to Small Business Stories, check out Audience Awards’ webpage—and start rallying friends and family for the voting round!
