Advertising places your brand in front of people who may or may not be paying attention. A sponsored competition on FailFast places your brand at the center of something people chose to participate in actively. They registered. They prepared. They showed up to answer questions on a topic you defined, for a prize pool you funded. That is a different kind of engagement.
Here is how the Sponsor role works end to end.
What a Sponsor Account Looks Like
Sponsors are a separate account type on FailFast. They cannot access FailFast Mine, cannot participate in group staking, and do not earn success or fail points. The Sponsor account exists to create competitions, fund them, and read the results.
Sponsors have their own progression system based on total payouts made across all completed competitions:
- Basic tier: 0 to 300,000 naira in total payouts. Wallet limit: 250,000 naira.
- Bronze tier: above 300,000 naira in total payouts. Wallet limit: 500,000 naira.
- Platinum tier: above 500,000 naira in total payouts. Wallet limit: 1,000,000 naira.
Higher tiers unlock higher wallet limits. This matters for sponsors who want to run large prize pools without needing to top up their wallet repeatedly between competitions.
Setting Up a Competition
When a sponsor creates a competition, they control the full configuration.
Questions. Sponsored competitions use the sponsor's own questions. The platform's curated question bank does not supply them. This gives the sponsor full control over the competition's subject, angle, and difficulty. The trade-off is that the sponsor is responsible for the accuracy of every question. There are no retry mechanics in sponsored competitions. Each participant gets one attempt per question. All questions are answered before any scores are revealed.
Scoring. Two options: equal weighting, where every question carries the same point value, or weighted scoring, where the sponsor assigns different point values to specific questions. Weighted scoring lets sponsors signal which questions matter most in the final ranking.
Access. Public or invitation-only. Public competitions appear in the platform marketplace. Invitation-only competitions are visible only to participants the sponsor has directly invited.
Study materials. Sponsors can upload preparation materials, PDFs, links, or documents, when creating the competition. These are visible only to confirmed participants from the moment they join. People browsing the marketplace who have not registered cannot see them. This turns the competition into a structured event rather than a pop quiz, and it protects the sponsor's content from being accessed by non-participants.
Registration closing date. The sponsor sets a date after which no new registrations are accepted. This must fall before the competition's start time. The gap between registration close and competition start gives confirmed participants time to review materials and prepare. If the minimum participant count is not met by that closing date, the competition is automatically cancelled and the full amount, including the platform commission, is refunded.
Participant limits. The sponsor sets both a minimum and a maximum number of participants. The minimum is evaluated at the registration closing date, not at competition start.
Who Enters a Sponsored Competition
Sponsored competitions require participants to be at Skilled tier or above. Rookie-tier users cannot enter. By the time a user reaches Skilled tier, they have completed a meaningful volume of verified practice and demonstrated real platform engagement. Sponsors are not paying to reach casual sign-ups who created an account yesterday.
Participants risk nothing to enter. The sponsor funds the entire prize pool. This lowers the barrier for high-quality participants to join, because there is no downside for them beyond the time they spend.
Payout Structures
Three options:
- Top 1 only. A single winner receives the full prize.
- Top 3. Three separate descending amounts. First place receives more than second, second receives more than third. All three amounts are set by the sponsor.
- Full descending with participation payout. Top 3 each receive individually set descending amounts. Everyone who finishes 4th or below receives a flat participation payout set by the sponsor.
The total cost to the sponsor is the full prize pool plus a 10% platform commission, paid upfront from the sponsor's wallet before the competition goes live.
After the Competition
Once a competition ends, the sponsor gets a full analytics view: how many people saw the listing, confirmed participant count, completion rate, average scores across the participant pool, performance distribution, and engagement metrics.
This is not just a headcount report. It shows how participants performed on the specific questions the sponsor wrote, which reflects how well the competition content landed with that audience. A sponsor can use that data to shape better competitions the next time.