Previously: 2022 Q3 Projects

Goals

• Dec 1st:

  • DAU: 600

    https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/will-manifold-reach-600-dau-7d-aver

  • Aka 40% MoM, or 10% WoW

  • Feb 1st: 1200 DAU

  • Apr 1st: 2400 DAU

  • Discussion

  • D1: 65% (62% today)

  • NW1: 27% (20% today)

  • [J] Stats always go down during the holidays, let’s set goals for Dec 1st instead of Dec 31st.

• Let’s create prediction markets for these to keep us honest!

Focus

• [s] Meta-comment: we’re still getting more juice focus on site basics and CUJs than explicit growth initiatives
• Product
  • Core experience
    • Improve CUJs (Critical User Journeys!)
      • Opening the homepage for the first time of the day
        • More focus on news & current events
      • Browsing to find interesting markets
      • Placing bets, checking recent bets, understanding your performance
      • Market mechanics: deeper liquidity, numeric markets, fr/mcm, groups of binary markets
      • New user experience: signup and bet, home page, etc.
        • Is everything understandable? What hangups are there?
      • Maybe
    • Collect user feedback and address it
  • Product excellence
    • Fix most all bugs
    • Polish
• Infra
  • Switch off of firebase cloud functions (except maybe triggered and scheduled functions)
    • [s] Skeptical of proactive migration, but think using Vercel for new functions is reasonable
    • [s] cost might be an issue: Gcloud = free $100k
  • Maintain or improve latency everywhere
  • Lower Firebase and Vercel bills
    • [s] rate limiting bots should get us a lot of the way, right?
    • [J] Costly scheduled functions: updateMetrics

Projects

• [J, iw] Home page
  • [J] Consider adding your own sections, like Fede’s doing for posts
• [c?] New user experience
  • Interview new users and solve their problems
  • [F] Would really like to do a zoom call with one user every day for a month
    • [A] +1
    • [i] Where do we get new users? I want to do this too
  • [D] Finding people who haven’t used the site?
    • Or users who are new to our site?
      • Answer: Both!
  • [D] Don’t need to do that many - quickly uncover more than you can fix
    • [S] Part of it is finding out about relative ranking of things too
  • What metric are we tying this to?
    • NW1 should be good target. Our D1 retention is good (esp if D1 remains the same as usage doubles)
• [s] Conversion funnels
  • Improving our conversion rates
    • Viewer to signed up
    • Signed up to bet
    • Walking out of the conversion funnel
  • Ask to share / refer friends in first 48 hours
• [f] Groups Improvements
  • Homepage sections for posts
  • Make posts and comments more prominent (LessWrong style of mixing in both)
  • [F] Don’t necessarily want to focus on new features - rather, focusing on creating new groups and content
• [i] Mobile apps
  • If this is simple, would add a lot of value
  • [c] should also make manifold a pwa
  • [S] A week is worth it
  • [J] 1 month would be fine?
  • [i] Even if we had to replace all the /divs with /views, wouldn’t take a month
    • Some libraries might not work — unknowable amount of time?
    • Replacing the components, still don’t think it would take a month
  • [S] Wants to just do a wrapper
• [d] Twitch Extension
  • Ian notes: this was the most fun on betting on a market!
  • Callout: Organic slow approach might work, but we need an initial spark/proof of concept
    • Streamers say “oh yeah this looks cool, I will use it”
    • But once you see other streamers using it
    • Start with Storybook Brawl tournament
      • Should be relatively cheap, afterwards: resume with more organic growth approach
• [f or i if mobile apps are too hard?] Private groups, markets, instances
  • Model: M$500 or $5 for a private market
  • Private things should be free
  • Ian notes: unsure if the demand is there for companies but they have paid us quite a bit
    • Private blockchain — value is based on network effects, you don’t get it in a limited amount of people
    • Polling team members, vs polling their users?
      • Maybe companies want private markets, but that’s not the best framing
      • E.g. if Atlas markets were public, and people could comment on “your markets are set up wrong”
        • Won’t get this info, and then would create bad markets
    • Do people actually get feedback on how to frame new questions? Ian’s seen it happen on, commonly “give me more details on the resolution criteria”
    • [S] Minimal version might not be good enough for companies
      • [J] Making markets private requires some engineering
    • [F] What about the Hanania instance?
      • Beyond the currency, are there feature changes that are needed?
      • Choosing who’s part of the group
      • Manifold for Teams
• [iw] Portfolio page improvements
  • Balance change log
• [s] Market mechanisms
  • Liquidity / robust subsidization
  • Maybe
    • Futures - requires a margin system, which is hard to design without making it exploitable
      • [S] One option: only Manifold creates futures contracts
      • Q: What’s hard about a margin system?
        • With arbitrary leverage, traders can go bankrupt, not get paid out, other shenangans
        • Had the problem with loans
      • Hard part: Making them be user created without being exploitable
        • Time series - then we want the perps
          • Feed time series from coinbase, etc, there’s a funding event every hour, just one contract for each thing forever
    • [J] Free Response - series of binary markets? Try to convert it to fixed payouts?
      • [J] To build CFMM free response mechanism
    • [J] Group of binary markets has a lot of use cases
• [A] Growth Hacks