The plan
- Begin as a fun addictive game
- Tracking your bets with a currency is inherently fun
- You get measurable feedback on your choices
- Social features are rewarding
- Interact with friends, create personal markets
- Debate issues
- The subject matter is interesting
- Popular questions
- Ones you have a strong opinion on
- It’s fun to collect rewards
- Daily betting streaks
- Unique bettor bonus
- Comment tips
- Referral bonus
- Because it’s fun ⇒ scales up by number of players ⇒ becomes useful too
- The Mana economy will inspire a slice of users to maximize profit, which means making the markets accurate
- You start to learn a lot from accurate forecasts on many topics
- Get trustworthy news and analysis
- Cut through the fluff with prediction markets
- Update your world view
- e.g. which policy is better, when AI is coming, how serious climate change is
- Ask questions that matter to you personally
- Book recommendations, whether to get a surgery
- Eventually: Ask questions relevant to your business
- Markets on everything
- Can forecast all manner of data, especially with new mechanisms perp swaps, futures
- Prediction markets
- Impact certificates
- Assets: Stock market, Crypto, Bonds, Real estate
- Our World in Manifold
- Social, Political, Economic, Demographic, Health
- Greater returns to scale
- The more markets we have, the more strategies available to trade between them
- Just how Amazon is the place to buy anything, people will check Manifold for the price / forecast of anything
- Building the best forecasting platform will change the world
- We can scale up in time to have better judgment on AI, and literally save the world!
We are on track
- Overall retention is good (~50% week-on-week)
- But new user retention is abysmal: 9% week-on-week, 4% D1
- However, this is actually good because it means there’s so much room for improvement!
- We just started paying attention to this last week
- It’s easy for our site to go viral (as we’ve seen!)
- Our markets are very shareable on social media
- We can master SEO like other Q&A platforms to get giant inbound traffic
- Low hanging fruit: We have so many valuable things to build!
- We iterate very quickly!
- If we are guided by user feedback and key metrics (D1 retention!), we can solve any problem and build something users love
- Let’s think of big user problems and tackle them with creative solutions
- We are already monetizing
- $10,835 USD of Mana purchased this year (excluding a $3k wire from Joel lol)
- Month-on-month growth of 24%
- Shows that people care!