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What's the best way to pitch Pioneer?
If you're working on highly technical problems no one is going to understand what you're doing anyway until you're basically at the stage where you're so polished you can spoon feed people everything... By which point you probably don't need any outside assistance. If you look at what goes on at Pioneer it's basically the startup equivalent of Instagram: lots of glamour shots with no actual substance. And at the end what do you get if you do manage to "win" something -- nothing that would help you out beyond what you can already do mostly for free yourself.
I found the app more useful as a diary than anything related to its intended purpose. And I don't really have the time to dress up boring engineering challenges to "advance" in the tournament. For what it's worth, I've checked out a fair few of the projects part of that tournament and there are some gems there. But I'd say the quality overall is low and the platform is more geared towards marketing bros than complex research or engineering projects.
The 1% for advice, status, etc. sounds like a good deal. $20k for 5% though sounds really steep unless you're planning on a very low exit (under $1M).
To best honest I don't see the point of this. I tried Pioneer and all the updates people wrote were vanity updates designed to look impressive and impossible to validate. I used the platform for a while with the hope of perhaps winning some perks in the future. But then I found myself spending all my time on trying to market my project and present my updates to be appealing to the rest of the "contestants" rather tha…
And anything social will promote what is popular or trendy to the tribe, and some of the actual better businesses are neglected because they aren’t “interesting”.
This brings the quality of the whole experience down since the best contributors are absent because they are building a company.
i personally would rather just get funding and take advantage of investor connections via introductions, and maybe occasional strategy advice. I don’t want the extra work. I currently have a side business making over 70k/mo in revenue and don’t have time to do anything extra. (Yes, side project, not solo)
We mostly don't even know how to get men and women to really talk with each other if the goal is not romantic/sexual in nature. I sometimes feel like I'm the only person on the planet trying to work on that and I get no credit and it doesn't pay spit.
I don't know how on Earth you think you can get people to work together if they can't even talk. And I don't know why that seems "non obvious" to most of the planet.
I'm also backed. I'm working on Squally, a PC game to teach low-level comp sci. My two cents: Other accelerators are under pressure to only fund companies that will be "top of their batch" come demo day. This often means rejecting small projects, solo founders, and pre-traction companies. However, Pioneer welcomes these companies with open arms. Make no mistake, it's still hard to get in. It took me ~8 months of sust…
To best honest I don't see the point of this. I tried Pioneer and all the updates people wrote were vanity updates designed to look impressive and impossible to validate. I used the platform for a while with the hope of perhaps winning some perks in the future. But then I found myself spending all my time on trying to market my project and present my updates to be appealing to the rest of the "contestants" rather tha…
So, you'd have to optimize your products pitch to be appealing to your peers, that means spicing up your landing page, adding cool graphics etc. I even went as far as having an option of easily creating a test account to play with the product without needing to sign up and sadly no one used it. For the first 2 weeks, I was getting more downvotes than upvotes. After which, I focused more on sharing metrics (sign ups etc) rather than solely focusing on reporting the work I have done. This did have a material impact in the peer rating process. Once I made it to Top 50, my project was selected by one of their experts, quite fast.
1. Leaderboards can be gamified, yes, and I am sure some participants try to do so. But that froth gets cleared in final evaluation by experts. And you can fool a small percentage by showcasing vanity metrics, but I always climbed higher in the tournament when we got actual customers and product growth.
2. If you are not from the valley, getting access to a strong network of peers who help keep you accountable is great
3. Also, you get back what you put in. I feel as if I am yet to get the maximum "juice" from Pioneer, but that is on me. I haven't yet asked for enough intros and personal mentorship help from the Pioneer team. But since winning the tournament, and joining the camp, we have talked to 20 potential customers, and have beta customers lined up.
4. Personally for me, this is a refreshing way of going from idea to business. It's 2020 - geographical constraints of being in the valley shouldn't be a barrier!
5. I think it definitely has some kinks it needs to iron out in the tournament (e.g. advisors never replied, and the feature is now scraped). And also in the camp itself - but I love the fact that the Pioneer team is actively working on iterating itself like a startup!
PS Yes, I know you don't always need accelerators or funding or mentorship to build a business. There is no one way of getting it right, and this is just one of them.
Your mileage may vary.
If Daniel or partners come here, I have a bit of (unsolicited) feedback:
When you join late it's easy to feel like no matter what you do you will not be able to reach the top 50% just because of first-mover advantage. Perhaps you could try a dynamic where even latecomers have a good chance as well.
Also, it would be good to be able to see all your historical activity within the site, as well as some kind of chart on how has your score been growing through time. I keep this in a notebook, but you could do it for all of us with a few lines of code ...
Last but not least, it would be very cool if you could show the complete leaderboard, not just the ones above/below you. This is the main criticism I've seen here and there directed towards the scores on the site being manipulated. If you make this transparent, the problem will go away.
To best honest I don't see the point of this. I tried Pioneer and all the updates people wrote were vanity updates designed to look impressive and impossible to validate. I used the platform for a while with the hope of perhaps winning some perks in the future. But then I found myself spending all my time on trying to market my project and present my updates to be appealing to the rest of the "contestants" rather tha…
I don't think that's the case. We're working on a highly technical startup (we make computer vision developer tools) and have been #1 on the leaderboard for quite some time now.
You're right that to be successful in Pioneer you certainly have to be able to clearly explain what you're working on to a general audience.. But this is an important skill to develop for the success of your company as well.
Regarding the lack of substance in updates, it really helps to link to verifiable supporting documents for your progress. For example, here's one of our recent updates: https://imgur.com/a/x63BAPn
We link to an imgur album every week with screenshots of the things we said we'd do. Eg, this is the album linked from that update: https://imgur.com/a/rJiKBD6