Part 0: Reflecting

• As part of Manifold Markets: Seed Round Memo, we outlined a plan for things we wanted to accomplish. How did we do?

Part 1: Projects Brainstorm

What are our large areas of investments over the next year?

• [s] Overall thoughts

• Mechanisms

  • Prediction markets

    • Good multiple choice
    • Good numeric
    • Date range

  • Stonks, Certs / Stonks

    • ACX Grants: Initial Cert Offering
    • Destiny/Dan Stock

  • Other contract types

    • Perpetual swaps or
    • Perp swaps/Continuous resolution
    • Paid polls
    • Bountied Questions
    • Manifold for Bounties
    • Manifold Grants
    • Metaculus-style distribution aggregating
    • Loans? Lotteries? Kickstarter?

• Mobile

  • Maniswipe

• Real-time betting Faster Bet Loops

  • [c] +1
  • [A] Note: Manifold is still missing a compelling real-time experience, eg Twitch betting bot
    • CF ChatGPT - people get instant feedback that they then share with others “look how cool this thing is”
  • [s] I believe this is compelling but most of the use-cases seem clustered in sports and e-sports.
    • The former is too competitive; maybe we still have a shot with our Twitch bot
      • [c] disagree with “too competitive” - it also means people are used to sports betting and those users are familiar with odds
    • What other groups/events would benefit from real-time UX?
  • [J] Skeptical. It’s very rare that Manifold currently gets a lot of bets in real time. That’s because the use cases are actually rare.
    • We should try to get this kind of traffic before building out infra to handle it (expensive in dev time)
    • [A] I’m thinking it’s less in “infra” and more about “frontend” & “use cases” like Stephen mentioned
    • [c] every manifold game night I’ve heard about (at least 3) was fun.
      • it’s rare that people do it because we have spent 0 effort designing around this use case. it’s not an obvious thing to do

• Monetization Monetizing Manifold

  • Subscription plan
  • [i] I like the subscription idea, we get 2 benefits:
    1. more user trust means bettors can rest easy and bet more
       1. We’ll take away/punish any blue checks that misresolve a market
    2. more $ for manifold!
    • however, I don’t think we should hide loans behind subs: new users will run out of mana too quickly without them. We just need to make them more intuitive, easier to understand

• Outreach initiatives

  • [A] Writing up thoughts in Self-Serve Tournaments
  • Rotating events Community events Awards Calendar
    • March Madness
    • Baseball season
    • 2024 election
  • Streamers
  • University students
  • [A] Personally cooling a bit on outreach/events; it’s not clear that midterms, world cup, Twitch streamers, and EA tournaments added a lot of value or reached a lot of users?
    • [s] I think things like the midterms were bad for growth but good for engagement.
      • Anecdotally, I’ve heard from many people IRL that they were following our midterms content.
    • Would prefer to work on being the platform, providing the tools so people like yaboi69 can create meme stock type things on Manifold and share them with their communities
      • [s] Perhaps. But there are a few events of global reach like US presidential election + world cup that it makes sense for us to do.
    • And/or tooling for contests — should aim to make spinning up new contests frictionless
      • [s] I’m not sure how much demand there is for contests that aren’t the big obvious events that we’re currently doing
    • [i] +1

• Growth hacking

  • Optimizing landing page conversions
  • Better tracking of referrals
  • Optimizing sharing/invite flows
  • [i] Stephen and I agree: we should prompt users after every bet to share it: it should be very easy, and it should be very easy to do the same after you win a bet to brag.
    • [s] like wordle did

• Community organization

  • Moving beyond “just a Discord group”
    • Addressing creator problems
      • What’s on Jack’s wishlist?
    • Fostering tournaments
      • Easier batch-create of markets (react-spreadsheet?)
      • Condensed view of markets - groups as tables
    • Fostering open source contributions
    • Events
      • More retreats
      • Manifest? An open Manifold conference with ~100 attendees?

• Supergroups/subreddits

  • Use case: Separate out Destiny from EA from core Prediction Market fans, such that each group has their own place to grow
  • Private Groups
    • Use case 1: companies asking questions with sensitive outcomes (eg hiring decisions; revenue targets)
      • [i] -1
    • Use case 2: groups of friends asking about each other’s personal info
      • [i] very cold on private groups, esp. for friends.
  • Leagues
    • Compete against friends on set of questions
      • [J] Could be in private or public groups / markets. Kind of like Ian’s vision for groups. Which wasn’t an obvious success.
    • Form teams that compete for profit on a set of questions
    • [i] there’s something to leagues that make people more competitive that could be good but I don’t know what form that would take. I know personally that Kiva saw explosive growth when they allowed users to self organize into teams to compete with others to lend the most money to 3rd world communities (The person from Kiva basically described this as charity, the ROI is nil).
    • [A] YES/NO sentiment on Isaac’s 69 market was pretty league-like

• Infrastructure investments

  • GCE server for backend
  • Supabase migration
  • Txn-ify everything (see MQP’s comments on Standup December 14, 2022 )
  • Migrate to NextJS 13 app layout

• ML investments

  • Recommendation engine for markets