Manifold Concierge

• White-glove market creation & aggregation service for hedge funds, banks, governments interested in paid research
  • ie turning Sovereign’s use-case of Manifold into a service
• opportunity: undercut existing expert networks with a lower cost, better calibrated alternative
• business model: charge $10k per created market
• white-glove service:
  • help clients come up with a research plan and operationalize specific claims
  • create, subsidize, and run markets for those claims on behalf of clients
  • provide periodic updates and reports
• sales model: adopt standard saas sales team tactics, pay 10% commission on sold markets, etc
• if this works, it’s a great business
  • aligned with our core mission of creating useful markets
  • doesn’t require massive consumer growth; plays to our current strength of a small, but high quality community
  • very clear business model that can scale naturally through sales
• reasons why it won’t work:
  • not enough demand for forecasting specific operationalized claims compared to the other qualitative feedback that expert networks can provide
  • the type of info hedge funds want to know may be too specific or niche to be a good fit for our markets
    • our markets might not attract enough traders or be calibrated for hyper-specific questions
  • manifold seems too weird, new, untrustworthy for financial world
• [A] What product changes do we need for this?
  • Make calibration page more compelling
  • Improve boosts

Partnerships

• Partner with real-money prediction markets to display their branding, refer traffic from our site to theirs in exchange for payment
• structured as a monthly retainer + bonus for signups
• this could be the big one
  • the value prop makes sense: we are the largest prediction market platform by usage but have poor monetization; other platforms have good monetization but worse usage. Massive opportunity to create value
  • the contract size could be very substantial, put us on the road to profitability
  • What could we earn rn? $50k / month sounds reasonable, and would scale as we grow
• what would partnership entail?
  • Incl their branding everywhere
    • external: in our newsletter, on our twitter acct, etc
    • internal: on the homepage, in every dashboard,
  • include links on markets mirrored on their platform
  • notifications/email to sign up on their site
  • ability to show linked partner acct from manifold?
    • e.g. link to your polymarket acct from your manifold profile
• Might want to have separate deals for different verticals
  • politics could have one official partner (e.g. predictit)
  • sports markets could have another (e.g. fanduel)
• we’d charge more to make the partnership exclusive versus inclusive (multiple partners)
• Sportbooks as an alternative
  • They have infinite money.
  • [A] But they probably have lower $/user rates? or are less good fits