Crikey! Pay $99 and get $6,620 worth of goodies to fast-track your startup towards the pantheon of techstars that, during their own green shoots, were also lean, hungry and hustling. Then enter the Lean Startup Challenge and stand a chance of maybe winning $120+K in prizes for your startup, including $100K in cash, mentoring from smart coolies like Rashmi Sinha from slideshare and a guy who went way beyond Edward de Bono’s Six Hats and accumulated 500 of them (ha!), and an AppSumo-Bizspark Avalanche.

So I found myself buying into the AppSumo way this morning exactly at 12 minutes before the offer expired. Don’t ask; I got up at 04:45 GMT to do it.

Buying the $99 bundle before it was sold out makes you feel a bit like this robot in the Robot Sumo Championships:

Plus if you buy one bundle, you get 2 to gift to your friends for free. This offer from AppSumo, in conjunction with SXSW 2011 and some generous partners including Twilio, Eric Ries, 99Designs and more, is hard to beat and Groupon has nothing on it (despite their soon-to-be $25 billion IPO, according to Silicon Valley insiders). When you’re a startup founder, anything less than 30% off tools that can help you rapid prototype, test initial user assumptions, pivot smartly and launch MVP cost-effectively is……good but not that good.

AppSumo is that good. Sure, there may be buyer’s remorse from some quarters when they discover:

(1.)         Some of the services are for limited time periods;

(2.)         A subscription charge may kick in after the first month for some services — which is equivalent to their trial basis offerings; and

(3.)         They’re not going to use all of the services for whatever reason.

Nonetheless, $99 instead of $6,620 is still a full 98.5% reduction!!!

That’s about as lean and smart as a founder can be without having to bribe anyone. Moreover, just because a service might not be appropriate for you to use during time period N, your startup friend(s) might be at a different stage in their company development and really appreciate a few of the services you get to gift away for free.

So the ROI on $99, once we include in ecosystem goodwill, definitely exceeds the $99. In fact, it’s about 50 Gatorade Fierces or 400 packets of ramen……….

Actually when you’re being lean ramen is a luxury. Try chewing boot straps and surviving purely on adrenalin, passion and grafting away at bytes of <code, #, @ and squiggly {]> and slide decks that would cost you $100-$150 per hour if you were to hire a third-party developer (more for Objective-C aficionados) and $250 an hour for a consultant to do market research and business plans. Decks that would floor and enchant investors like these:

The bundle gives access to a comprehensive range of reduced price third-party services that will get you to launch with less pain and more brains. This includes:

* $100 worth of Kissmetrics

* $99 entry to a Startup Weekend event

* $108 of PivotalTracker to do agile product development

Now let me talk specifically about one of those services I believe is really useful, especially for non-technical founders: launchbit.

THE LAUNCHBIT KIT

Although I have a few advantages as a founder (former strategist, can code and have a maths degree so numbers don’t seem like gobbledygook), I completely appreciate that there are founders who need step-by-step guides to help them through the initial phases of idea generation and sanity-checking. What I saw playing around with launchbit’s system are structured assignments that are as good as — if not more integrated than — the ones I did on a US accelerator program last year.

Here’s a sample screenshot courtesy of Launchbit:

The great thing is that at each stage, Launchbit provides links to other third-party providers that are dedicated to helping you do initial market research. There are also private notes written by the founders that host another series of valuable and relevant links to startup tips and tricks.

So why and how am I using Launchbit? Well…………

TASTEMAPPER

I’m developing a mobile phone application that’ll let users post, tag and rate pictures of interesting places and products they happen across during their daily adventures. Think FourGrams meets 5-stars on steroids. FourGrams being FourSquare and Instagram, natch’.

Launchbit’ll help me framework the way this idea gets sanity checked and how to take into account marketing considerations (keyword search, SEO etc.) as well as the Bigger Picture one of figuring out the market potential, and having one place to put the idea iteration material and cross-reference it against their tips and tricks.

Additionally, they link to free and reasonably priced prototyping tools like Balsamiq and Mockingbird which I’ll use before I get into the nitty-gritty of Objective-C coding — which I’m polishing up with insights from Apple’s Developer Program, some MIT Press books alongside cool YouTube videos like this one:

Making sure market research and size potential is done thoroughly, prototypes get user input and getting into the flow of Launchbit’s systematic discipline will probably end up saving more time and cost further down the line.

So I’m +$6,620 up for being lean and smart about the way founders go about prospecting for digital gold. Me? I’m putting my marker down with Tastemapper and going digging with AppSumo’s $99 bundle.