To the investors of Manifold:
Key developments
“The future of theater x reality TV” — Grimes
“It's like if TPOT somehow got a Broadway show. 5 stars. I'm long @ManifoldMarkets.” — Samuel Hammond
Our surreal dating show musical with live betting premiered to a packed theater and a standing ovation last weekend. In addition to the live audience, the show attracted 3,500 streamers plus an additional 5,000 viewers from a sponsored costreamer on Twitch. The recording currently has 20,000 views. Over 15,000 trades were made during the performance itself. The event also lead to over 1,000 signups (including promotion before the event). We’re expecting reviews in a few publications and for the hype to continue to build…
- Politics: More complete election coverage + more custom UI. We’ve also hired a part-time contractor to create markets and provide timely commentary and analysis.
- Manifold Love: We’re now monetizing by charging for prediction market creation. Now that the product has reached a certain level of completeness, we’ll be putting it in maintenance mode and returning to development of the core platform.
- Manifest 2024, Jun 7-9 in Berkeley: We’ve set the date & venue for our premier conference centered on prediction markets. We’re aiming to double the attendance (to 500-600 people) attract great speakers, and turn a sizable profit.
- If you or someone you know might be interested in speaking at or sponsoring this conference, reach out to [email protected]!
- New features: new portfolio page, more moderation features, continued database migration
- In the pipeline: improved news dashboards (esp for Politics and AI)
Quick thoughts
- This primary cycle may end up being the most boring one that has occurred during my lifetime, with Biden and Trump as the obvious candidates (at a 90% and 96% chance of nomination, respectively). Given that markets thrive on uncertainty and intrigue, this has predictably been bad for business. I still believe that focusing on this election cycle can be transformative, but most of the growth events will come later in the cycle, possibly as the result of Trump’s legal drama.
- This month we launched and then quickly killed off manifoldpolitics.com, in favor integrating our Politics offering into the core platform. You can read my reasons for doing so here: [manifoldpolitics.com considered harmful](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/manifoldpolitics-com-considered-harmful-a47e97aa2d3d4f8897de44587c867dd7)
- Live musical theater. That’s not a phrase typically associated with Silicon Valley startups so I thought I’d discuss a little bit of motivations for creating Bet on Love. Essentially, the opportunity to commission a totally unique Broadway-quality musical about Manifold with a reasonable chance of becoming a cult hit fell into my lap, and given the relatively low cost, I couldn’t say no. The show was a labor of love, but also very intentionally an elaborate marketing stunt, with boundary-pushing content designed to maximize virality. The quality of the show and video recording were above even my expectations, and both the live audience and several celebrities have publicly praised it. No one can guarantee cultural longevity, but this show has a good a shot of becoming a cult hit as any, and with it, driving traffic to Manifold for a long time to come.