Hey PH! Pioneer will soon hit a big milestone: we'll have funded 100 people from over 32 countries. Despite it only being a year, about 30% of our Pioneers that started companies have gone on to raise follow-on funding from the likes of Y-Combinator, General Catalyst, Village Global, and others. Once a player becomes a winner, we try to give them the benefits of being in Silicon Valley, but through the Internet. Some of our Pioneers have met their co-founders through Pioneer, an ultimate act of startup generation. Many of them have raised money by virtue of being a Pioneer. Just like other startups iterating on their product based on user feedback, we're iterating on ours. Here are some updates for our next release: 1. We're verticalizing: We’re going to take a dose of our own startup advice and focus on funding small projects that might turn into businesses. This lets us make something much better for a smaller audience. 2. We're simplifying our offer process: If you reach the top 50 after two weeks, you get reviewed. See the blog post for more details. 3. We're offering more funding: We'll offer Pioneers to advance to $20,000, $100,000, or even $1M at our discretion. Check out the blog post to learn more: https://pioneer.app/blog/pioneer... If you're working on something interesting, big or small, we'd love to see you on the leaderboard!

Pioneer has been a great productivity hack for us. As an early stage startup founder it’s hard to get a benchmark for how you’re doing relative to your peers. Matching up head-to-head weekly is a great way to assess your progress. I like to describe it as “the hunger games crossed with a todo list”.

Pioneer has gamified getting more done. Roboflow is more productive as a result. And the community keeps getting better!

We (https://karmabot.chat) were fortunate to get selected as Pioneers recently. I believed in Pioneer 1.0 and support v2.0

I did Pioneer with Clearcall and it was the best decision I made in 2019. Highly recommended. Good job team!

Pioneer has given us the best peer group we've ever had.

We've been doing Pioneer since 5+ months with vinko.io and it has helped us a lot in setting goals, keeping progress, and getting feedback from fellow founders. As a gamified remote accelerator, Pioneer can be valuable for any kind of startups wherever it is.

I've been serving as a mentor for Pioneer, and I'm consistently impressed by the quality and sincerity of the Pioneers. Kudos to @narang_rishi and @danicgross

Pioneer has been great for me. You will absolutely find yourself working harder. You will find yourself working on a Sunday evening because you haven't yet completed the tasks that you said you would in last week's progress report. Accountability + gamification + incentives is a powerful way to boost productivity.

This sounds interesting. Vetted communities with like minded people would definitely be something I'd be interested in. Now one comment though: Firefox doesn't recognize your websites SSL certificate issuer. So can't get on the website (well with Chrome yes), felt like sharing that.

Wow @ the follow on funding stats! Congrats @narang_rishi

Brilliant

It's been two weeks that I'm on Pioneer (seobuddy.com) and so far it's been an exciting journey with great companies to review and vote for every Monday (but 20 might be a bit too much in my opinion). The weekly update form is perfect. I only which you hade time to make more integrations for Metrics, maybe you could do a community vote to suggest the most important integrations to push.

Daniel is disrupting accelerators with this distributed model!

What about the language barrier. Do participants need to be fluent in English?

Wondering why startups would do it - 20k for 5% is a lot for equity, the other packages might work. On which decision are you offering those?

Pioneer has been great my startup, getting weekly feedbacks from my peers motivated my company to be where it is now. I am on pioneer with bufferway.launchaco.com

Pioneer has changed the trajectory of my startup (Deft — https://shopdeft.com) and my life. Through incremental and subtly powerful means it forces you to develop precisely the primary quality of a good founder — relentless resourcefulness for executing on the things that matter. As a result you're rewarded with hockey-stick growth and no "post-YC slump". Highly recommend!

Pioneer is an amazing thing. It indeed takes the idea of an accelerator online, and makes it available for people all around the world. I love the regular feedback, love to see what other fellow Pioneers do, and learn from them. Their progress and feedback from the Pioneer team (and especially Daniel) makes me move forward and shows me my blindspot. Highly recommend it for any early-stage startup! Pioneer - keep up! 💪

Just got started after reading recommendations elsewhere. So far looks very professional, will be interesting to see how community works out.