Part 0: Reflecting

• As part of Manifold Markets: Seed Round Memo, we outlined a plan for things we wanted to accomplish. How did we do?

Part 1: Projects Brainstorm

What are our large areas of investments over the next year?

• [s] Overall thoughts

• Mechanisms

  • Prediction markets

    • Good multiple choice
    • Good numeric
    • Date range

  • Stonks, True Certs

    • ACX Grants: Initial Cert Offering
    • Destiny/Dan Stock

  • Other contract types

    • Perpetual swaps or
    • Perp swaps/Continuous resolution
    • Paid polls
    • Bountied Questions
    • Manifold for Bounties
    • Manifold Grants
    • Metaculus-style distribution aggregating
    • Loans? Lotteries? Kickstarter?

• Mobile

  • Maniswipe

• Real-time betting Faster Bet Loops

  • [c] +1
  • [A] Note: Manifold is still missing a compelling real-time experience, eg Twitch betting bot
    • CF ChatGPT - people get instant feedback that they then share with others “look how cool this thing is”
  • [s] I bo competitive; maybe we still have a shot with our Twitch bot
    • [c] disagree with “too competitive” - it also means people are used to sports betting and those users are familiar with odds
    • What other groups/events would benefit from real-time UX?
  • [J] Skeptical. It’s very rare that Manifold currently gets a lot of bets in real time. That’s because the use cases are actually rare.
    • We should try to get this kind of traffic before building out infra to handle it (expensive in dev time)
    • [A] I’m thinking it’s less in “infra” and more about “frontend” & “use cases” like Stephen mentioned
    • [c] every manifold game night I’ve heard about (at least 3) was fun.
      • it’s rare that people do it because we have spent 0 effort designing around this use case. it’s not an obvious thing to do

• Monetization Monetizing Manifold (David)

  • Subscription plan
  • [i] I like the subscription idea, we get 2 benefits:
    1. more user trust means bettors can rest easy and bet more
       1. We’ll take away/punish any blue checks that misresolve a market
    2. more $ for manifold!
    • however, I don’t think we should hide loans behind subs: new users will run out of mana too quickly without them. We just need to make them more intuitive, easier to understand

• Outreach initiatives

  • [A] Writing up thoughts in Self-Serve Tournaments
  • Rotating events Community events Awards Calendar
    • March Madness
    • Baseball season
    • 2024 election
  • Streamers
  • University students
  • [A] Personally cooling a bit on outreach/events; it’s not clear that midterms, world cup, Twitch streamers, and EA tournaments added a lot of value or reached a lot of users?
    • [s] I think things like the midterms were bad for growth but good for engagement.
      • Anecdotally, I’ve heard from many people IRL that they were following our midterms content.
    • Would prefer to work on being the platform, providing the tools so people like yaboi69 can create meme stock type things on Manifold and share them with their communities
      • [s] Perhaps. But there are a few events of global reach like US presidential election + world cup that it makes sense for us to do.
    • And/or tooling for contests — should aim to make spinning up new contests frictionless
      • [s] I’m not sure how much demand there is for contests that aren’t the big obvious events that we’re currently doing
    • [i] +1

• Growth hacking

  • Optimizing landing page conversions
  • Better tracking of referrals
  • Optimizing sharing/invite flows
  • [i] Stephen and I agree: we should prompt users after every bet to share it: it should be very easy, and it should be very easy to do the same after you win a bet to brag.
    • [s] like wordle did

• Community organization

  • Moving beyond “just a Discord group”
    • Addressing creator problems
      • What’s on Jack’s wishlist?
    • Fostering tournaments
    • Fostering open source contributions
    • Events

• Supergroups/subreddits

• Infrastructure investments

• ML investments