FROM 1000th TO 1st on PIONEER.app

”Dad, will you buy a car next or a house?” — asked my son

"I will build a business first, if God allows us." - I replied

We have been in Toronto for 9 months now. The first 3 months were spent settling down, finding good schools for my kids, and finding a place to stay. Then, I decided whether to find a job or start a business.

I did not take the approach of finding a job first and then starting a side business. My past experiences told me that this approach would not be successful. Many dedicated people fail at this, so what makes me different? Also, I would not have enough energy and time for my family, making my quality of life almost zero.

I considered several start-up ideas, mainly between crypto and AI, decentralized vs centralized. I had developed MVPs for both, pondered for a week, and picked the AI project, Sifu.art, where users can learn, play, and live their Kung Fu adventures.

(way before the big collapse of FTX and all, which makes me think I am still blessed after all).

Time for some SWOT analysis:

• Strength1: I can pull this off with my technical and start-up experience
• Strength2: I have a head-start advantage on this project
• Weakness: I am a solopreneur, which mean I run my own business instead of having a co-founder. Why? I believe in the saying "Having a bad co-founder is much worse than none".

That weakness of owning 100% of my own business leads to another caveat: Getting myself up and motivated every morning can sometimes become a Herculean endeavor. My solution? Join an open worldwide start-up tournament at Pioneer.app. Being very competitive all of my life, I know that I won't stop until I reach the very top.

In Pioneer tournament, you earn points by:

1. Setting up your startup profile at the start.
2. Submitting your progress weekly (which stops after a month).
3. Being voted by other competitors. This is the most intriguing aspect of the competition, as it requires you to maintain a high level of competitiveness while also appreciating your opponents. This really puts my integrity to the test, and I enjoy this aspect of the tournament.
4. Voting for others and receiving gratitude in return can also convert to points.

The first day I joined the Pioneer competition, I brought over a website related to the NFT idea. However, I received negative reviews for the first few weeks. I realized that NFT had a negative association with the crypto era, so I removed all related keywords from my website and social media accounts.

As a result, my ranking improved from 80th place. However, I was only ranked 80th in the Non-US America table, which was one of the lowest among the six regions (Africa, Asia & Oceania, Europe, Non-US Americas, US East, and US West). I realized I could be 1000th globally, which was not very encouraging.

Campaign 1: Put Up The Sign

When I first started out 10 years ago in a different project, I wrote a thick business plan, and never let anybody near it. All is dust now, which tells me one thing: nobody cares what you are doing. No need to hide from the sun, instead go out and get yourself a tan.

My fellow Pioneers gave me feedback that my idea was unclear at first. But after several weeks in the tournament, I invested time and energy into building and delivering a comprehensive "thought projection" of my business, including:

• A blog, which you are reading now. Creating a blog JUST for the tournament is a new, even crazy idea for other start-ups, but it turned out to be very effective. You can put much more content to an update, and the update will also serve as a piece of your social media campaign.
• In that blog, I put several technical posts about my product, some are very lengthy and detail like this A SNEAK PEAK INTO FUTURE article. This is idea is even a crazier than the first, but proved to be strong because people want a reason to believe that you are really doing what you said and you are capable of pulling it off.
• I spent two sleepless nights building a mobile mock-up app (which is actually an app running on my Android phone) after a comment from a fellow BJJ tracking app. My health was on the way of degeneration.

The first campaign was a success, my ranking jumped from 80th to 40th which proves my efforts paid off. But my ranking remained stagnant for another two weeks, indicating that I needed to upgrade my strategy. It's time to deliver the core of my project.

Campaign 2: Deliver The Meat

Going with mock-up, blogs and landing page design for too long make me doubting myself if I can deliver the strike. I had built a proof of concept for my product years ago, but now I needed to bring it to life. My plan included:

• Backend: Train the deep learning model to accurately identify correct and incorrect postures.
• Data: My expertise as a Hung Gar martial artist, one of the most prestigious schools, gives me an advantage with access to all the world's martial arts data, collected and categorized over the years.
• Deployment: The pipeline includes a web/mobile client, API gateway, and inference engine.
• Security: I wasn't surprised to find the webserver hacked the next day after setup. I've been hacked so many times that I don't take server security lightly.
• Mobile client: The task is less daunting than expected, as this is upgrade from the proof of concept .
• Web client: To engage users from the moment they land on our site, I learned from the Dropzone team and added a demo to the first section of our landing page.

After delivering all the things mentioned above, I was challenged by snowstorms in Canada. Despite my illness, I was pleased to see that both my product and my ranking rose, moving from 40th to 15th. The only question remaining is how to reach 1st place in the Non-US America table, which would place me 30th globally, especially since my peers are now building real products with real customers.

Campaign 3: Be The Sage

One rule in life: "What goes around, comes around." You can never get something out of nothing. I kept thinking, what value do I bring to Pioneer.app tournament? What makes our fellow entrepreneurs happy? Nothing so far! Moving from 80th to 15th in ranking was only possible because of the generosity of my peers.

The only way I can contribute is by reviewing products from other teams. I have a decade of experience working for myself, making me well-equipped to excel in this task.

I devised a strategy of adding value to other teams, while catching their intention and getting more upvotes for my reviews.

• Introduce my real name and my company. This add a personal touch to the message, which Pioneer team lacks. I will come back to this later.
• Use Emoji 👊🤚
• Be polite 🌹🌼🌺, give them praises ONLY if they deserve, while always look for constructive critics.
• Give ONE suggestion for improvement, use https://imgur.com for annotated screen shot of their landing page.
• Don't forget to wish them good luck, founders like it (doesn’t every body?). Zero tolerant for negative thought though.
• Ask them nicely if they can appreciate my comment. I work hard for this didn't I? Plus, people always get things by asking nicely.

Pioneer.app caps the maximum review upvotes by 4, each worth 25 points, converting to a maximum total of 100 points that I can earn each week. Since the beginning of this reviewing campaign, I always exceed this limitation, sometimes revving 9 upvotes from my fellow pioneers.

The campaign was not a breeze though. I spend at least 4 hours every week only reviewing others' products. The last time I worked as a consultant I charge them 200USD/hour, so every week I invested 800$ worth of labour to the tournament!

Consistently work through the ranking, I ended up as No.1 of Non-US America, or 35th in global leader board for most of Jan 2023.

Sifu.art at 1st place

Being at the first for a while, I decided to move on. But before coming the next step, I would like to review a little about Pioneer.app tournament:

Pros:

• Global playground for start-ups. Being an entrepreneur for most of my career, I never been to such a diverse playground like this, it was fun and I am grateful to be at the top. I loved being around start-ups, all hungry, all excited to be the next generation of tech founders. They from Africa, US, Asia, and other corners of the world.
• Very good design in terms of algorithm and rules. I have a feeling that it's fair.
• It waked me up every morning (and kept me stay up after 3AM, too). Don't know if I could keep the momentum after leaving the competition?

Cons:

• Lacks of personal touch. Since I joined until I leave, I never received any message from a real person, at least that's my feeling. I received a recruit email from a guy name Andrew Ng, which I checked the profile seems real on LinkedIn. I was not sure if his own email or from the system, so I sent a TEST email asking for how to join. Of course I knew how to join, I'm a business man, not a stupid man. He responded basically with a tut video that I know 100% automated. From that point on I wouldn't expect to have much interaction with their team. I joined anyway.

⛳️The first red flag : I needed GPU power to train my deep learning models and I know that they have plenty of them as an incubator, so I sent an email anyway asking for some of it. they never reply, and I have no way to prove that they are actually run by robots or humans. Common guys, you are working with founders, who risk all for their dreams and join your tour… at least pay them some respect.

⛳️ The second red flag: Since I started at 1000th place and moved up until I got to 1st place, I never received any email from a real person. I have a feeling that in the last 3 months they haven’t select any Pioneer (e.g invested 20k for 2% equity). Robots or humans?

So that will be it, I put some effort in, take some result out. Now it’s time for the next step: establish relationship with customers and make sale.