To the investors of Manifold:

Top asks

• Bet: What will be the highest impact outreach initiative for Manifold in Q4 2023?

Key developments

• Metrics

• Manifest! Our inaugural forecasting conference was a huge success, with 250 guests and an all-star guest lineup including Nate Silver, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Destiny, Aella, and more! The median attendee satisfaction score was 10/10. In the coming weeks, we’re expecting more substantial press including NYT coverage (a NYT journalist attended).
• Angels! Several Manifest attendees have expressed an interest in investing, so we are now accepting checks. As a courtesy, if you're interested in investing a small amount in Manifold (around $10k-$100k in a $40M postmoney SAFE), please let me know. We don’t intend to spend much time on this, and the plan is still to defer a more substantial raise until next year.
• Quarterly review: Read our reflections on what went well and what didn’t in Q3.
• New features: Dashboards, new Browse page + consolidated search experience, feed improvements (esp for new users), multiple choice mechanism improvements, NSFW tag (see the markets that inspired it if you dare), better referrals
• In the pipeline: Growth hacking 💪, improved dashboards, market sets (collection of independent binary markets)

Quick thoughts

• Our platform has hit an inflection point. Previously users who signed up on Manifold were shown trending markets that performed well on the platform overall but had only a dubious connection to users’ true interests. Now, users are shown content related to the topics they select in onboarding. Our activation rate (% of new users who bet) reflects this improvement, jumping from ~40% to ~70%. The LK-99 believers and the Logan Paul degens can finally trade in peace, blissfully unaware of the other’s existence.

  What this means for the platform is that it should be vastly easier to onboard users from communities who look different from our current userbase, i.e. to grow. This, combined with our other feed improvements, means that it now makes sense for us to spend a much larger fraction of our time on growth hacking and outreach initiatives versus core platform development.

• Manifest has been a huge success in terms of getting important people interested in prediction markets in general and Manifold in particular, but unfortunately, it hasn’t been a success in terms of DAUs. Prestige is important in ways that are hard to quantify, which makes events like Manifest a good bet. Still, this quarter, we intend to host some DAU-successful events as well.

• Spammers are increasingly becoming a problem for us.

Thanks for your support, and may all your bets be in your favor!