Where we are now

We’ve built a beautiful general purpose platform for user-created prediction markets that has a highly dedicated community behind it and is slowly growing.

But…

Growth could be faster!

The universality of the platform makes it unnecessarily confusing—having markets on every topic can be overwhelming for new users (if you sign up to bet on Gaza, you probably don’t want to see the GPT-4 sudoku market). It also makes it hard to market it toward new users, who are less interested in a general purpose utility than specific niches.

The solution:

Building out custom experiences to solve users’ specific needs.

This can take the form of building new sites (or subsites) to solve the problems that users are on platform are having today. These new sites can make use of all of our existing market infrastructure, community, etc. and for the most part will be a cosmetic UI layer on top of the functionality offered by the core platform.

This is what I mean by a semi-pivot.

Semi-pivot ideas

Manifold.Love

• [J] Just need to get 1000 more users, that would make it more viral because it is more useful
• [s] We are looking into ads.
  • [A] Cost per user acquisition? $20/user x 1000 users seems kind of fine
  • [s] Pretty high
• How to monetize?
  • [s] Boost your profile. Send roses. Bounties. Subscription plan.
• [S] When do we decide that Manifold.love isn’t working?

Manifold Politics

(see also Manifold Politics (proposal))

• Background
  • Current events drive a majority of the traffic on our site today.
  • Within current events, US politics are a majority of the markets—and will become even more important with the 2024 election.
  • Dashboards are an attempt to solve the problem of displaying news and political events in an easily digestible way, but aren’t that great.
• Vision:
  • A custom site (manifold.politics) or sub-site (perhaps at news.manifold.markets or politics.manifold.markets) dedicating to politics betting and/or news.
  • It might be best to just focus on US politics. Inspirations: PredictIt + 538
  • This will involve more substantial manual and algorithmic curation and rethinking the core UI.
• Thoughts
  • Since consumption of news is the biggest use-case on the site today, this could end up just being a redesign of the core platform
  • Since this is still in the mass-market consumer space, there aren’t any obvious monetization strategies beyond what we already have or are considering for the core platform
  • Pursuing this idea seems obvious to me, but I’m very uncertain of what the specific UX would be…
  • 1D vs 1W vs 1M version are different bets
    • Just removing other markets might be the thing that matters?
    • Or maybe we need lots of curated content?
  • Iowa caucuses are Jan 15th
    • [J] Worth doing the 1 week version of politics before Jan 15th

Manifold Careers

• Vision
  • A job board hosted by Manifold with public-facing profiles for both individuals and companies and markets on job applicants.
  • The UX would probably be pretty similar to manifold.love
  • [J] Prediction markets - when someone is looking for a job, they create a market for each person. They have a LinkedIn page. You can see friends pages, bet on them
    • You can also add career questions, they help you plot your career