Where did we drop the ball? The point of this isn't to point fingers or assign blame, but rather to identify where our processes and strategy are not serving us well.
This time, I will actually resolve the market to a rough approximation of what I think actually didn't go well. Place your bets!
Last time: https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/manifold-team-q3-retro-what-could-h
1,000
3.00[s] Biggest miss: sponsored a smash tournament for $10k without much benefit. Be more careful about this in future
[d] with bet on love - originally 10k-20k, now it's 50k?
[s] scope changed -- thought it was like London, but now
[d] would we have put down 50k to make this, based on where we are now?
[s] impact calculus should be similar to manifest; cost a lot of money, direct DAUs might not make it worthwhile enough, but the connections + press
[a] fwiw, money isn't still that much of an issue -- really want to be conserving time
[d] would have preferred a $30k campaign with afk creators, rather than doing bet on love. biggest issue with streamers is getting enough of them
[s] Might need to solve this for a particular streamer first -- this would then scale to other creators. also has less chance of "blowing up"
[d] bet on love, the biggest way it blows up is a writeup (like Manifest)
[d] given that storybook brawl didn't grow, it was a bit of a mistake to try smash
[d] could have weighed things a bit more. should have more conscious-decisionmaking, rather than falling into opportunities. Possibly because we haven't had many great opportunities/sponsorships, but perhaps we should have higher standards for ourselves
[J] product isn't good enough to justify most of this outreach. We have to improve product, or find a marketing channel that's extremely good
[J] It's generally a mistake to wait to make something look good before. We needed a live product in December
[D] Don't know that another week of launch
[S] Disagreement -- think Inga's designs have been important to get right
[s] Don't think it's as much an issue of knowing what to do
[c] also value in shipping faster -- we missed one of the debates
Need to find a consistent source & stream of people; and find a consistent schedule
Source users who are somewhat in target audience, have some time to spare
People currently don't have much time, or don't have much money
[J] Not just doing it, you have to think deeply and make the changes. If you're demo-ing something you didn't build, you're less able to fix it. One reason we need to participate -- if you built the feature that had a problem. Eg with the feed, it was key to have ian there
[A] Plan to do interviews at the commons -- loop in the people who are working on this (ie Inga, Stephen)
[d] Manifold politics Target: anyone who spends 1/week on following politics
[A] Could have leaned into different events that happened to get more traffic.
[J] I think it's more important to build the product to enable growth from these events. Fix up the onboarding to convert a larger percent of new users so that dau doesn't slowly decline. Improve dashboards or topics so users create and share them to drive more growth when viral events do happen. Product-led growth is the only sustainable path!
[J] Instead of trying to chase each event, we need our product
[J] Shouldn't be declining in user activity; if we made the core product better, then people would stick around. Dashboard that are user-created. We need product-led growth.
[S] news dashboards are not as good as they could be. [c] The dashboard product is lagging. but skeptical that dashboards are the right form factor
[S] hoping to make them better for politics
As one specific thing this is almost a non-issue, but as a sign of "didn't have enough time to address lots of user complaints until the point where it is just normal", kind of rough. I'm not convinced that fixing 100 bugs people complain about was going to make a big difference to anything though, so not buying Yes.
Buying Yes in this one. Previous quarters had major new features on a regular basis and that's almost all stalled out. Exploring new market formats, betting UI, fixing groups/topics, etc. are all huge things right in front of you and it's been stuck for a while now due to focus on the politics and dating sites.
It seems like "pending supabase migration" has been slow to materialize and every month that goes by without substantial progress hurts a lot. My general understanding is completing this would probably result in several effects that should feel more like "multiplying" than "adding".
Obviously hard to say until after it's done, but if you look back later, I think you might find yourself saying "should have done that sooner".
@Eliza I think this is true! mqp originally came back to work on this during this quarter but there's a lot of drudgerous grunt work. And nobody else wanted to work on it even though it was obviously important, we've all been putting it off. I think the pace picking up now and hopefully I'll get it done this or next month