Startup veteran David Levine was among the hundreds of entrepreneurs who chose to launch their product at the SXSW Interactive conference.

Levine is the CEO and founder of Geostellar, which uses its sustainable energy network to allow homeowners to look up their address and receive a free solar energy audit of their property. The company receives commissions from solar companies if a homeowner chooses to pursue solar power. The application is available to the entire U.S. except for Alaska.

"For me, the purpose of the launch is to get as many people as possible just typing in their address and recognizing that they have an opportunity not just to massively reduce their carbon footprint and fight climate change, but they could also decrease their utility bills and have money for other things. It's an important message," he said.

Levine said SXSW Interactive is the only conference that would allow a tech company to break through with their products.

"South By [Southwest] is really the only thing I could think of where I thought we really wanted to introduce it to a broad audience," he said. "There just really wasn't any other event that made sense."

However, he said it was not easy getting the product ready for the SXSW launch because it was just a few weeks ago that Geostellar got the idea to build social features directly into the application.

"I took everyone together and said, 'I'm really sorry we don't have a time machine, but we're going to have to pull this off," he said. "I'm really proud of how great the application actually looks on all platforms, on the tablet, on the iPhone."

To stand out from the crowd, Geostellar created a marketing campaign where staff passed out four different-colored stickers with the Twitter hashtag #initfor and one of four words: love, money, power or glory. Attendees could then choose whichever sticker they wanted and tweet out the hashtag and word they chose. Levine said the hashtag really took off on Twitter.

"We've now found people tweeting at brunch this morning #initfor mimosas," he said the morning after the company's March 9 launch.

Geostellar uses a lot of data for its analyses, but Levine said the other key part of Geostellar is the social dynamic.

"There are certain people who are really solar evangelists, and they're the ones walking around with their iPads showing everybody how much solar energy they generated that day or right now," he said. "We wanted to give those people the tools to encourage others."