First, we need to give proper pimpage where pimpage is due: AppSumo is Teh Awesome. Even more awesome is their latest bundle for lean startups (seriously, if you haven’t seen it, you need to check it out – over $6,000 worth of way cool software for $99!). Awesomest: the Lean Startup Challenge .

Here’s why we kick ass (and why we totally deserve to win):

Who we are

We are a ragtag bunch of misfits hoping to make the world a better place to live in, one neighborhood, one community, one city at a time. Our About Us page has more details about who we really are (and ways to stalk us), but it’s not the most exciting part about us. What you really want to know is…

What we’re doing

We’ve got a game that can help you get your butt off the couch. Have you always wanted to be more active? More involved in your local community? Make new friends? Discover stuff in your town or neighborhood that you never knew was there? In short, this game helps people broaden their horizons, explore their community, and share those new experiences with their friends and be a part of an new game community. This game is called The Human Mosaic Project and we’re here to help you get out of your house, off your couch and to interact with your community in fun and unique ways. Then, of course, we kinda send you back to your couch to report on your adventures. (But hey, at least you got off your couch in the first place, right?) The best part (or at least in Sara’s opinion because she’s addicted to points and achievements) is that you get points and achievements (aka badges)! And when we get things really hopping, we’ll team with local businesses to get you prizes, too! Here’s our page: The Human Mosaic Project . You’ll notice we’re in need of a serious facelift, which is why…

We need money

Who couldn’t use money? Seriously? Every startup needs money. Especially Lean Mean Fightin’ Machines Startups (because they’re awesomer than other startups, right?). Not everyone needs money for the same reasons, though. Here are ours:

We’ve got oodles of passion and drive to get this startup not just on its feet, but jumping around and frolicking around town. But we’ve still got day jobs. (Granted, they’re day jobs that we LIKE, but still.) And we would love to be able to focus more time and energy on really getting this game, this startup off the ground.

Warner’s plea: I love this so much but do it in my spare time and dream of the day I can make this the only thing I do. It’s coming, but I would love for it to be sooner rather than later. I also could use some additional development help. Having just one full-time developer on this project would make so much difference, or even a really, really good front-end designer/jQuery guru would be awesome!

We’re Lean! (But not mean, nor combative, nor cyborgish.)

We freely admit that we don’t know all the answers. (Man, wouldn’t that be nice?) If we did, then we would have built the perfect game right out of the gates. We don’t know what people are going to like or not like about the game that we’re building. We also don’t know if businesses are going to flock to it like ravenous birds (we’re thinking like vultures on roadkill, but to leave you with a more pleasant image we’ll say like pigeons on that french fry you just dropped in the park). That’s why Customer Development (and Lean) is so important to us. We get the answers we need from the people who matter, and then to get working on the most important bits, leaving the rest for the birds. (OK, enough with the bird stuff.) And we can manage to stay organized, without spending all of our time getting and staying organized.

Agile development! We’re huge fans! This goes hand-in-hand with Customer Development (and did we mention Lean?). We develop stuff in small chunks – only what we need when we need it – and then we test those chunks.

Player (and User) Experience. There’s no point in having a game that kicks ass if it’s too difficult to actually play it. (And it doesn’t hurt for things to look pretty, too. See the aforementioned plea for monies.) We used Balsamiq (they kick a LOT of ass) for our mockups before we built anything. Then we revised them. And again. Now we’re working with our beta players, asking them to tell us what sucks and how we can make it rock. We are working on making things rock with these…

Lean tools

We were more than stoked when we caught sight of this Lean Startup mega-bundle from AppSumo. And this was when the total value was “only” $1000. It’s only grown since then, and to be honest, we’ve almost wet our pants with excitement. Here’s a list of what we’re really excited about:

• Pivotal Tracker for our Agile Product Management
• KISSmetrics to track our users flow through the app. Which assignments are they completing? How frequently are they coming back?
• CrazyEgg is going to help us in our first big redesign
• We are setting up a Continuous Integration server (Jenkins) that will use SauceLabs to launch our Selenium test scripts
• UserVoice is letting our players tell us what they want the most
• LessAccounting is going to ridiculously simplfy our bookkeeping.

And the ones we haven’t even had time to jump into, but looking forward to trying out: SnapEngage, uTest, texting.ly, Batchbook, PandaForm, Ask Your Target Market, Postmark, Twilio, SlideDeck Pro, Geckoboard, and GinzaMetrics. (Plus there’s still more! We’ll be using this bundle for a LONG time!)

So, to sum up (or, to wrap everything up in a nice little burrito):

We like money. OK, that’s not really our sum-up.

We’re really psyched about our idea, and we’d love, love, LOVE for you to be psyched about it, too. And if you’re not, we want you to tell us what would make you totally psyched. We’ll get there. We’re committed to getting The Human Mosaic Project (which some of the founders like to fondly call THuMP, while others like to fondly call it HuMP ;)) off the ground and running until it’s wildly successful. We’re gonna do that whether we win or not. But oh, how nice it would be to get there that much sooner!

Want to check out what our players have been up to while we’re busy iterating and fixin’ bugs on the website? Hop on over to our posterous blog and see!

(Please vote for us. It’ll make you popular. Also, it’s good karma. And we have stickers… or we will, as soon as we order them from Sticker Mule.)