Moving goalposts, a judge who entered and won, and total silence afterward. Avoid.
I took part in a Vaya challenge and gave it real time and effort. I came in wanting this to be good. I’m leaving with a one-star review and a clear warning: don’t spend your time here.
The rules were never stable.
Criteria changed mid-challenge. New ones showed up late. One scored startups on hours worked, which is a joke as a metric: anyone can burn six hours on junk and outscore someone who shipped something real in two. You can’t build toward a target that moves after you’ve aimed.
Deadlines were moved on people.
More than once. Participants plan their weeks around deadlines, and changing them mid-competition favors whoever the change happens to suit and punishes everyone who planned properly. See Car Maintenance challenge.
The leaderboard didn’t mean anything.
It showed revenue, customers and XP, then the final call was “top three,” so nobody could say why you’d go for first. XP seemed to reward posting on social media over building anything. If you can’t tell what you’re being judged on, you’re not in a competition. You’re guessing.
The font challenge winner was part of the organizing team.
Gabbi Song announced the challenge in a video, then was replaced in that video by Roman, with no explanation. During the reviews, participants met with the team, and Gabbi was in those meetings asking questions, so she was clearly on the organizers’ side. She then showed up as a competitor in the same challenge and, per the leaderboard, won it. There was no announcement, so the leaderboard was the only place to find out (it ended in October). You do not get to help run a competition and also win it, and if it was somehow fine, it should have been disclosed to every participant up front. It wasn’t. Everyone else was left to find out on their own, and no one has any reason to trust that result.
A one-week challenge was judged like a finished product.
People can ship a lot in a week, but nobody ships flawless in a week, and the judging showed no sign of knowing that.
When it ended, so did the communication.
No results, no next steps, no word on upcoming challenges. The challenge was quietly pulled from the site, leaving only an archive. I’m not asking for much: tell people what happened. Instead the organizers went silent and left participants to chase them for basic answers. With this many people putting in work, that isn’t a rough edge. It’s disrespect for people’s time.
Bottom line: Startups can be messy. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is changing the rules and deadlines on people who are working for free, letting someone from the organizing side win, and then going quiet. One star. Until they fix how they run this, I’d steer anyone with something better to do with their time away.