To the investors of Manifold:

Key developments

• Metrics

  

• Election buzz

  • The attempted Trump assassination and Biden’s stepping down have put the spotlight back on Manifold, propelling us to record usage. In the last week, we’ve had over 1.1 million site visits.
  • Here’s Elon Musk laughing that Manifold’s severs are straining under the load.
  • Matt Yglesias sharing one of our dem vp markets.
  • We've also been providing extensive election coverage in our newsletter.

• Manifest

  • Our second annual forecasting conference was a huge success with over 600 participants attending, including special guests like Nate Silver, Robin Hanson, Chris Best (CEO of Substack), and many more! Steve Hsu called it ”Woodstock for nerds”.
    • Kind words about Manifest 2024
  • It was also profitable: we earned $80k of net profit on 320k in revenue (across sponsorships, ticket sales and room bookings)
  • Here’s Austin and myself being live-interviewed by Theo at Manifest for his podcast.

• Infra: Manifold has finished migrating databases. We’re now fully on Postgres. This combined with a number of backend performance improvements, should make it easier for us to scale to the larger audiences we're expecting for the election.

• Other features: Market liquidity tiers, simplified homepage + search, user profile summary

• In the pipeline: sweepstakes markets

Quick thoughts

• We are eagerly anticipating the launch of our real-cash sweepstakes markets. Our original plan was to launch around Manifest, but we've been delayed by our lawyers. We are now planning to launch mid to late August, which will give us ample time to operate for the remainder of the election cycle.
• The recent election news is a huge boon to Manifold. Massive uncertainty around large, important topics is always going to be one of the largest growth drivers of prediction markets. Now that a Trump/Biden rematch is off the table (boring!), we can very confidently predict more traffic spikes as the public scrambles to find info on breaking news.
• In the short term (next 2 weeks), we’re investing in more infra improvements so that our site can handle traffic during breaking news
• In the medium term (next 3 months), we’re aiming to raise our mana sales up to $100k/mo (up from $16k over the last 30 days) on the back of our launch of sweepstakes, and thereafter raise our Series A.

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

Stephen

Cofounder of Manifold