Your Pipeline & Board

This page is the map of the surface you'll use most. After it, you'll know what a pipeline actually is, what every column of the board does and why it's there, and why each move you make on the board makes Pioneer better.

A pipeline is a question you ask once

A pipeline is a standing research project, a question you ask once and Pioneer keeps answering. "Find climate tech startups for partnership" is one pipeline. "Discover angels investing in AI" is another.

Each pipeline has three teachable parts:

• A description: what you're looking for, in your own words
• Criteria: what makes a lead a good fit, with MUST rules for deal-breakers and SHOULD rules for preferences
• Properties: the data you want researched on every lead, from "headquarters city" to "VP of Operations"

Keep one pipeline per goal. Criteria that try to describe two different targets at once qualify neither well; two focused pipelines beat one blurry one.

Start on the /pipelines page

When you navigate to /pipelines, you'll see:

Suggested recipes

Based on your purpose (set during onboarding), Pioneer generates personalized pipeline recipes: specific, narrow starting points tailored to your goals.

• Click Try this to pre-fill a pipeline with that recipe
• Click Not for me to dismiss it. Pioneer learns from the dismissal and suggests differently next time.
• Edit your purpose to change the direction of all suggestions

Your purpose is worth a sentence of care, because it powers every recipe. "Sales stuff" gives Pioneer nothing to work with; "finding enterprise customers in financial services for our compliance automation platform" gives it everything.

Example purposes:

• "Lead generation for enterprise SaaS deals"
• "Finding seed investors for my climate tech startup"
• "Building partnerships in the fintech ecosystem"
• "Sourcing API vendors for our data pipeline"

Create a custom pipeline

If none of the recipes fit, create one from scratch: describe what you're looking for, define your criteria, and Pioneer starts discovering. Step-by-step: Create Your First Pipeline.

The board, column by column

Each pipeline is a board, with leads flowing left to right. Every column exists for a reason:

• Preferences: the leftmost column, and not a lead column at all. It's your pipeline's control center. It shows what you're looking for (description, criteria, properties) at a glance, surfaces Pioneer's suggested refinements, and holds the steering box where you type corrections in plain language. It sits beside your leads on purpose: what the pipeline looks for, how to correct it, and what it produced belong side by side. Click the pencil to edit, or collapse the column for more room. Full guide: Refine Your Pipeline.

• Incoming: a box directly above the Leads column showing leads Pioneer is researching right now, each with live progress. It's visible because watching leads materialize is how you learn what Pioneer is doing for you, and it's where stuck or failed leads show a warning and a Retry button instead of silently vanishing.

• Leads: where researched leads land, best matches first. Leads that are relevant (every MUST criterion met) sort highest, followed by mostly relevant and partially relevant. This column is the handoff point: Pioneer's work ends here and yours begins. The more leads button in the column header is where you ask Pioneer for another batch or upload your own list.

• Relevant: leads you've approved. This is the first custom stage, seeded for every pipeline because approving a lead needs to land somewhere. Rename it to match your process like any other stage.

• Custom stages: your own columns between Relevant and Done ("Contacted", "Meeting Scheduled", "Proposal Sent"). Pioneer deliberately doesn't impose a sales methodology. After approval, the workflow is yours, so the stages are yours too. Deleting a stage never deletes its leads.

• Done: the finish line. Rename it to whatever fits your workflow ("Won", "Closed").

• Rejected: leads you passed on. Nothing in Pioneer is ever deleted by a board move, so you can bring any rejected lead back whenever you want.

The board is live: new leads and column changes appear in real time, no refresh needed.

When someone outside Pioneer needs to see the board rather than a spreadsheet (an investor, an advisor, a partner), Share in the pipeline header emails them a personal read-only link, or creates one you can copy and send yourself, no account required: Sharing a Pipeline.

Every move teaches Pioneer

Approving and rejecting isn't just bookkeeping. Every move is ground truth about what a good lead looks like, and your judgment outranks anything the algorithm believed. A lead you approve despite a middling score tells Pioneer your criteria are stricter than your actual taste; a rejected lead that was relevant says the opposite.

Pioneer turns that feedback into concrete suggestions: after each discovery run, the Preferences column offers up to three Recommended actions, specific criteria or property changes, each shown for your review before anything is applied. And the steering box takes plain-language directions ("more hardware companies, fewer resellers") and converts them into a criteria change you approve or discard.

This loop (review, notice the pattern, refine, run again) is where Pioneer pipelines go from decent to excellent. It gets its own guide: Refine Your Pipeline.

Next steps

• Create Your First Pipeline: the step-by-step walkthrough
• Read a Lead's Research: how to review what lands on the board
• Teach Pioneer What a Great Lead Looks Like: the rules behind everything above
• Sharing a Pipeline: a read-only view for people outside Pioneer

Need help?

If you have questions, reach out to us at support@pioneerclimate.com