Pioneer — a player’s perspective
An inside look at “a home for the ambitious outsiders of the world”
Update
Pioneer is not what it appears. The scores are being manipulated to choose the right projects to win. Analysis with numbers can be found here. The article below is presented in its original form.
I’m here to tell you about my experience of participating in Pioneer — a weekly online tournament for projects that strive to change the world. I participated in two rounds of the tournament so far (4 weeks in April batch and 5 weeks in the current cycle) with Loresome as my project, and the journey has been transformative for both myself and the app — never before could I finish so much in a week and focus on impactful changes instead of “feel good” improvements. Read on to learn more about the tournament structure, and my subjective take on its features.
Pioneer
Pioneer is a gamified tournament and community for ambitious creators from around the world. Hundreds of projects from 100+ countries compete each week to reach the top of the global leaderboard and become Pioneers. The tournament used to run in monthly cycles, but recently it switched to a continuous model. Here’s the distribution of participating projects by category from a few weeks ago:
Education dominates the chart, most likely because the distribution of participants is skewed towards college students and recent grads frustrated by the current state of education system. Other notable categories are AI, Healthcare, and Cryptocurrency. Not many people hope to change the world using math, unsurprisingly.
Offer
The tournament winners receive a ton of perks; among other things it includes:
- $1000 cash
- $100k in Google Cloud and AWS credits
- Free Stripe Atlas company formation
- Tickets to Silicon Valley
- Mentorship
You can find the full list of prizes and conditions here.
But what are the organizers getting from the tournament? Here’s the relevant part:
If you create a company from your project and raise money from investors, Pioneer will have the right to invest up to $100,000 alongside them. Our right will expire once we’ve invested $100,000 in the company, and it is capped at 20% of the round size (if others are investing $50,000, we’ll invest at most $10,000).
What if you don’t want or need to create a company? That’s totally fine with Pioneer.
Many of our best Pioneers will be researchers, painters or musicians. Extremely successful people in many lines of work make the world better. But extremely successful entrepreneurs have a comparative advantage at making a lot of money while doing it. We hope that a small stake in their companies can fund future generations of Pioneers.
Past Pioneers
Pioneers are a pretty diverse bunch, here are a few examples from the last round:
- Arun Johnson (18), United States: studying new nuclear fusion materials
- Ahmed Moselhi (17) and Cameron Kerr (15), United States: personalized immunotherapy drugs via AI
- Karolis Šablauskas (27), Lithuania: automated heart ultrasound analysis
As you look through the past winners announcements, you may notice that the participants tend to be young and work on buzzword-rich projects, however there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.
Ready player one
You participate in the tournament by submitting a weekly report and voting on other participant submissions. Based on the votes you get points for the global leaderboard. In addition to voting, you can earn points by completing one-off tasks, or “quests”, like uploading a 1-minute video about the project, or joining the Discord chat.
Report
Each week you have to submit a progress report (+50 points for each consecutive submission, up to 200 points).
All fields in the report have character limits, and there are no embeds allowed. Players are utilizing a plethora of hacks to make their report stand out:
✅ Bullet points
✅ +5 Numbers
✅ 59% more emojis
✅ Less words
🏆 bit.ly links to screenshots or demos
Voting
After the voting is complete, you’ll get an email with points summary and feedback that you’ve received:
Advisors
After getting to the global top-100 you get a chance to choose your “board of advisors”. For each of the 3 slots you can select a person out of 6 options. After that you can send a message, and wait for a reply. The tournament boasts such stars as Marc Andreessen and Stephen Wolfram among others, and they advertise the diversity of fields covered, but you can still feel the Silicon Valley bias.
Chats and community
Pioneer organizers are constantly experimenting with chats on Discord. Upon joining the Pioneer Discord server (+50 points quest) you the Pioneer bot will assign you to a “village” — a channel with 20–30 participants to chat about anything. Originally the allocation was random, but the current model is to group similar projects together.
Chats provide a feeling of community and also lead to serendipitous discoveries. Once I asked a question about hiring freelance designers, and got a link to Refactoring UI in one of the responses. This turned out to be the most influential design resource I’ve ever read.
Pioneer constantly experiments with engagement techniques. The organizers have tried running 1-hour AMA sessions with experts (that was fun!), now they recruit community managers to seed the discussions in chat.
Personal experience
Playing in the tournament transformed my approach to goal setting and completion. Now I always think twice what are the most important next steps, and if they are achievable in a week. And after committing to a goal, there’s no “I will do this next week” anymore. Because of that superpower, I’m able to accomplish things that I would’ve been putting off forever. This article is one example, going through the hell of publishing my first app to the iOS store was another.
Advisers sure sound like a great selling point, but my experience was a big letdown. I’ve sent 4 messages to 4 people (+1 message for a Pioneer experiment in which the organizers claimed to send it to multiple relevant experts), asking questions specific to their background and received 0 replies. Oh well, I guess nobody is interested in a gamified motivation tool. Either that or my communication skills need improvement.
Getting weekly feedback and encouragement is also a great motivation booster. The feedback in general is different from what I would get from the users, because tournament participants consider the overall project development, not just user-visible side of it.
Conclusion
Playing in the tournament works really great for me, it might work for you too. Try it out, 280 symbols a week is a small price to pay for the motivation and focus it provides :)
Thanks for reading! You are awesome🛡️
