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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

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 than... you know... working on the actual product. Like, what is the point? 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.

devmunchies 7y ago
Yes. I think it has the same problem as IndieHackers (which stripe also invested in / acquired), where it’s mostly for people who don’t have anything going for them. If you already know what you need to do it’s a waste of your attention. It’s becomes social media for founders. 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)
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Is your side business a B2B SaaS?
- alexcnwy 7y ago
  I sort of agree but Indiehackers does have loads of useful content especially the interviews with successful bootstrapped founders (who I agree aren’t really on the forums much)
  - devmunchies 7y ago
    Yeah I agree. I go on IH several times a week out of habit. The podcast is solid.
666_howitzer 7y ago
That is kinda true, since the peers who would be rating your weekly progress update wouldn't necessarily be your target audience. 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.
yeldarb 7y ago
Edit: I had more I wanted to add that wouldn't fit in this comment so I wrote it up as a blog post here: https://blog.roboflow.ai/how-to-win-pioneer/ https://blog.roboflow.ai/how-to-win-pioneer/ 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 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 https://imgur.com/a/rJiKBD6
juliawu 7y ago
I thought I was going to have the same problem with my blockchain project, and ended up becoming a winner despite the jargon in my updates. The updates pushed me to work on a "wow feature" every week in hopes of winning support from voters, and encouraged me to communicate progress better (helps with storytelling and good practice for product/investor updates). Also, promising applicants get vetted by experts.
baristaGeek 7y ago
I do agree that some stuff needs to be fixed: For example, your weekly update stands out more if you add emojis. However, it's flawed to think that you can't win building something highly technical and abstract. We won with a highly technical project. A PCI compliance-as-a-service cloud container. A self-contained Docker distributed through a Kubernetes pod. Not everybody understood the technical jargon, and it's ok. People liked us because we were trying to solve something important.

devmunchies 7y ago

Yes. I think it has the same problem as IndieHackers (which stripe also invested in / acquired), where it’s mostly for people who don’t have anything going for them. If you already know what you need to do it’s a waste of your attention. It’s becomes social media for founders. 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)

dillonmckay 7y ago
Is your side business a B2B SaaS?
alexcnwy 7y ago
I sort of agree but Indiehackers does have loads of useful content especially the interviews with successful bootstrapped founders (who I agree aren’t really on the forums much)
- devmunchies 7y ago
  Yeah I agree. I go on IH several times a week out of habit. The podcast is solid.

666_howitzer 7y ago

That is kinda true, since the peers who would be rating your weekly progress update wouldn't necessarily be your target audience. 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.

yeldarb 7y ago

Edit: I had more I wanted to add that wouldn't fit in this comment so I wrote it up as a blog post here: https://blog.roboflow.ai/how-to-win-pioneer/ https://blog.roboflow.ai/how-to-win-pioneer/ 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 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 https://imgur.com/a/rJiKBD6

juliawu 7y ago

I thought I was going to have the same problem with my blockchain project, and ended up becoming a winner despite the jargon in my updates. The updates pushed me to work on a "wow feature" every week in hopes of winning support from voters, and encouraged me to communicate progress better (helps with storytelling and good practice for product/investor updates). Also, promising applicants get vetted by experts.

baristaGeek 7y ago

I do agree that some stuff needs to be fixed: For example, your weekly update stands out more if you add emojis. However, it's flawed to think that you can't win building something highly technical and abstract. We won with a highly technical project. A PCI compliance-as-a-service cloud container. A self-contained Docker distributed through a Kubernetes pod. Not everybody understood the technical jargon, and it's ok. People liked us because we were trying to solve something important.