Note this is basically just rly random thought regurgitation stage rn

What is going on with the Manifold Product?

“I love you guys and please dont take this in a bad way, but I feel manifold is lacking a consistent vision and instead feels like a fiefdom run by crazed scientist barons.”

-Odoacre

It started off with the occasional wacky new feature developed during a monthly hackathon such as Manachan. Then it became a more regular occurrence for some new, unexpected feature to suddenly materialise, even though users had high demand for a specific change that had yet to happen. Then we suddenly had an entire new side company called Manifund. Then we were organising a 250 person conference. And now we are creating a new website that is a dating app?

What is going on??

Factors such as the stage of our company, the employee composition of our company, and maximising high end of varience are all at play here. Let’s break down each individual and how it has affected our product road map (not that we have one) and why we approach app development the way we do

Stage of our Manifold

• Still within a couple of different niche communities
• Growth spikes from events, but no pattern of sustained growth with people sharing it with others who stick around and share it with other.
• Goal still remains to reach 100,000 DAU asap for series A and before we consider monetising properly.
• With this goal in mind, we don’t care about making our product more compelling for our just current niche of users. We need to find ways to make it more compelling for potential new users (which will naturally also improve the experience of current users). And sometimes this includes taking on crazy projects which don’t align with our current product as you might expect.

Employee composition

Manifold was very intentional about hiring full-stack devs who were comfortable with working independently and have “decent” UI design skills (insert Inga frown, our actual UI dev).

This allows us to assign a new feature to an individual, and then by the next day a minimal viable product (MVP) will probably be live before anyone else has even had a chance to see it. It is then demo’d in standup where people give feedback and further iteration is made also taking into account user feedback.

Pros:

• Super super fast.