An organizer called "Rapha" spammed me an invite to join this 4-week program, promising cash prizes and mentorship.
But it turned out, unlike real accelerators, they don't pay you up-front, you have to "win" from one of a few grants from select partners (among 100 entrants so most people get nothing, like a carrot on a stick to get you to participate)
Also, the methods used by "Ralpha" are so spammy, eventually even program emails would go to Spam box.
This is also reflected in the caliber of cohort members. Since rather than being as selective as possible like most accelerators (he is spamming for goal of 500 participants instead of just 100 this time) most members do nothing, while others are outright crazy (one told me Chinese eat cats in DM, granted they were banned when I reported it)
The organizers really don't know what they're doing or talking about. It really shows in the way they give bad advice. For example, in one week's "lesson" Rapha strangely advises builders to not go to sites like social media or Hacker News to gain user insight (terrible advice obviously, and here he is posting it on Product Hunt!)
What was more bizarre, they started copying me from my notes I was using to submit updates!
For example, in one note, I put as to-do "reach out for user insight on Discord" (and assigned it to a colleague). Rapha then reversed his original instruction advising "go where builders are" (i.e. contradicted original bad advice after spying on my project notes)
More examples of the leeching... after spamming people to use their failing Betallion platform (for builders to get beta testers), I added all my open source projects to support it, then they started copying my app icon logos! For example, chatgpt.js had a rainbow background, so they changed Backdrop to have the same. YouTube Classic had pixelated scheme, so they pixelated their logos. Even the web pages they were adding would borrow sectioned color elements from chatgpt.js.org...
Another conspicuous act of leechery, because I added the URLs of some of my projcets like chatgptwidescreen.com and chatgptinfinity.com, they noticed the way I build products connect to each other very harmoniously. That's when they abandoned the betallion.com and 100.builders domains, now it's called backdropbuild.com and backdropbeta.com like my domain structure (since they thought my promotion of "chatgpt" is how I got OpenAI funding, so they are trying to promote "backdrop" which 100.builders does not do at all)
It was like every day I would discover some new thing they copied, no matter how trivial. From the very beginning it did not stop. The earliest example... I applied and called my teammate a "partner in crime" in the application. After acceptance, in the intro video Rapha markets himself as his co-founder's "partner in crime"!
Also the weekly "missions" were quite ridiculous. For example, the entire 1st week's "mission" was build a readme! That's right, an entire 25% of the hackathon is spent on creating a document, rather than building your world-changing thing... (no wonder half the participants dropped out, only 50 projects got built out of 100 entered)
It really was quite bizarre how much bad guidance was given (and no one is all the wiser, since these builders are quite noob andt cannot tell bad from good advice unlike me) and how consistently they relied on my weekly progress updates to shape actually better guidance (another example, I was adding new features like hotcakes, so they stopped focusing on unproductively pressuring the builders to build completed projects i.e. minimal features are suffice)
It's almost like I was being used to teach them + builders for free, and got literally nothing out of it...
