To the investors of Manifold Markets:

Top asks

• Bet on our markets to help us prioritize what to work on.

Key developments

• Metrics

  

• Revenue: Almost $10,000 in mana sales in December versus $6,500 in November!

  

• Seed extension: We’ve raised an additional $171k at $25M post from angels, most of whom are users of the platform

• HQ change: We’re centralizing our operations in San Francisco. All 3 cofounders + 2 employees will be located in SF by the end of next month.

• Hosted Onsite: Texifold (December 4 to 12), company onsite in Austin, TX + meetup

• New features: iPhone app(!), Maniswipe (try it on mobile!), better group design (one example), Destiny.gg promo, Twitch bot improvements, @mentions

• Events: World Cup Tournament, Manifold Giving Tuesday (after Thanksgiving)

• In the pipeline: better recommendation algorithm, Maniswipe v 2, True Certs, migration to Supabase (for cost & perf reasons)

It’s been just over a year since Manifold was founded. In that time, we’ve gone from the outline of an idea to a full-fledged platform with over a thousand daily active users.

It can be easy in retrospect to paint a picture of the inevitability and obviousness of our idea, when in reality, most people thought we were crazy when we were starting out. Our success to date has come from staking our reputations on these highly contrarian ideas:

1. Prediction markets are still worth pursuing even after the colossal failure of previous startups like Intrade and the rise of regulated platforms like Kalshi.

2. User-resolved markets are a good idea (versus top-down resolution by the platform or a complicated oracle consensus system). This has been the key to our growth as a platform and our ability to offer a wide variety of content to users.

3. Play-money markets not only work; they uniquely allows us to route around regulation and lower the friction to consumer usage.

4. People will pay real money for play money.

Thanks to Scott Alexander for being our very first supporter and the first to really “get” the idea. (Because of the counter-intuitiveness of user-resolved markets, he gave Manifold the delightful epithet of the “chaotic evil version” of prediction markets.) His continued support and extensive coverage on his Substack have been invaluable.

Thanks to our wonderful employees and contractors Ian, David, Sinclair, Inga, Marshall, and Alice for all their hard work this year! I am continually impressed by how fast we’re able ship!

Thanks also to our great investors for their advice and insight into running this startup, especially Jay, Vishal, Akhil, Thomas, Barak, and Daniel!