What initiatives will help Manifold reach Product-Market Fit?
36
142
resolved Aug 27
30%1.9%
Bonus M$ for daily betting streak
30%58%
Outreach to groups outside of the rationality sphere. (gamers, crypto traders, politics junkies, journalists...?)
25%10%
Leagues
5%0.8%
Better emails after you sign up + digest emails
5%2%
Show related markets at the bottom of market page
5%2.0%
Loans
3%
Creating and sharing popular groups of markets (like the markets from PredictIt)
3%
ANTE
1.4%
Better incentives for creating fun, relatable, controversial markets.
1.2%
Better incentives for long term markets
2.0%
Section for biggest daily and weekly movements in probability for markets you bet on or saved
1.9%
better introduction to beginners / improved explanations, hints on the mechanisms of how different markets work
0.0%
Get rid of buying mana possibility
0.0%
Tax on not beted mana
0.0%
Reduce click bet to 1
0.0%
Fantasy football
0.3%
Partial resolution of markets
0.0%
More detailed search capability to find interesting markets quickly (multiple topic filters at once, ability to exclude topics, search by volatility, etc)
0.0%
More niche-expertise markets
0.0%
Better free-response markets for making choices

Resolves N/A if Manifold does not reach PMF (product-market fit) by close date (a year later).

Otherwise, I will pick answers according to my judgment of how much each initiative contributed proportionally to PMF.

PMF is defined vaguely as when our site starts growing consistently and quickly. E.g. from 250 daily active users to 500 daily active users over (say) 6 weeks.

Update: changed the close date to be in a year, so it is more likely to not resolve N/A.

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This is a tricky one. I'm not sure whether we have Product-Market-Fit now, although we have grown a lot (10-15 times?) since a year ago and our retention is better.

After the superconductor thing we were able to grow by like 85% in a short period, and keep the gains day-to-day. I think the fact that we are able to retain those users is really important and pushes me toward thinking we do/did have PMF. (Although another big component our high daily active users is just a higher rate of new signups.) So I will conclude we have PMF and pick answers that contributed, especially those that I perceive increased retention.

Outreach didn't even give us the big growth wins, usually it was just random events that happened. That said, I think more outreach, i.e. marketing, is key to our growth today.

In that case, picking from the above answers I'd say:

30% streaks

25% leagues

5% loans

5% related markets

5% emails

30% outreach

There's probably a few more features that are better answers but weren't added to the list, like
- faster site performance
- better trending score for markets

- better SEO

@JamesGrugett so you just have picked the one so you can win some, congrats dude you just won virtual points

i have been owned :(

@jacksonpolack im trolling dude

bump

bought แน€150 of Outreach to groups o...

I think this should resolve to outreach - nice work @DavidChee, @QuantumObserver, et. al!

answered
Outreach to groups outside of the rationality sphere. (gamers, crypto traders, politics junkies, journalists...?)
bought แน€20

@JamesGrugett Does it still count as "outreach" if they mostly just kind of fell on your lap?

bought แน€5 of Creating and sharing...

@MichaelWheatley I think big news items like this one are naturally going to be the driver for user acquisition. It's not about outreach per se, but being able to foster and capitalize on discussion and hype, see the FTX crash for another example.

bought แน€40 of Leagues

I think the kind of intentional capitalization on discussion and hype that the @ManifoldMarkets twitter account has been doing counts as outreach. But I think a N/A resolution is reasonable too. I don't see any resolutions other than N/A or outreach as highest make sense, none of the other options (other than leagues) are at all noteworthy

bought แน€10 of Curious to hear your...

Curious to hear all your thoughts on the โ€œsuperhumanโ€ or โ€œSean Ellisโ€ leading indicator of PMF as an alternative means for resolution https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit

answered
Better incentives for creating fun, relatable, controversial markets.

@JamesGrugett idk, badges/achievements? Kudos in the newsletter? Access to EXCLUSIVE discord channels? (Wait maybe you already have that)

answered
Bonus M$ for daily betting streak

@JamesGrugett I dislike making things addictive or other manipulative techniques. I think it's better to make people genuinely excited about predicting things.

The biggest thing which keeps me from betting is that the market probability already looks reasonable, and making a better estimate would require extensive research. Since you're not about to start paying people large amounts of real money... Hmm maybe one option is more markets about things people are already well informed about? (And a better free-response pattern of usage that's not just a Keynesian beauty contest) So maybe more personal markets? I'm going to add an answer here for "more niche-expertise markets".

@extent_of_foxes I think free-response markets, when used to make choices, need some more features. I don't know the math, but it should genuinely act as a collection of conditional markets, or something. At the moment, there's no reason to bet on answers that are very low, since they won't be chosen, if the creator is just picking the highest one. At the very least, maybe an option to individually mark each answer as "tried, was good (pay out some M$)", "tried, was bad (don't pay out, M$ lost)", and "N/A (all bets void, M$ returned to betters)".

An extra feature might be to give the market creator a one-click way to see what they should try next, where every answer might be selected, with probability equal to market probability (or something, I don't know the math).

I'm answering "better free-response markets for making choices".

answered
More detailed search capability to find interesting markets quickly (multiple topic filters at once, ability to exclude topics, search by volatility, etc)

@GavrielK We were thinking of a separate Explore page that has lots of different ways like this to slice markets.

Maybe different sections of markets with horizontal scroll like Netflix.

answered
Outreach to groups outside of the rationality sphere. (gamers, crypto traders, politics junkies, journalists...?)

@MichaelWheatley Yep, will be very interested to see how the Salem Center thing goes but I can imagine targeted outreach being super helpful, like getting popular journalists to open questions here and ask their followers and colleagues to bet, getting political comms groups to use Manifold when trying to predict ad buy outcomes, etc.

answered
Partial resolution of markets
bought แน€1

This unlocks and improves a lot of use cases. For example, partial resolution of numeric markets would improve fantasy football, because players can pay out as they score points.

Another example: a "next bug fixed" market with partial resolution could keep resolving 20% of the current pot every time a bug is fixed and the same market could be a permanent fixture, never fully resolving.

answered
Bonus M$ for daily betting streak

@JamesGrugett I'm not sure this is product market fit because I don't think it's financially sustainable, unless there's another funding source to pay for the freebies.

answered
Outreach to groups outside of the rationality sphere. (gamers, crypto traders, politics junkies, journalists...?)
bought แน€5

@MichaelWheatley Iโ€™d include sports groups here. Obviously sports betting scratches a lot of that itch, but I think there are a lot of invested sports fans who would love to create and run their own sports markets for more specific predictions.

answered
Get rid of buying mana possibility
bought แน€10

@FranklinBaldo Mana should be earn only. There are many others ways for monetize the product.

Currently people run out of โ€œmanaโ€

You could either

a) allow massive leverage on small positions, so people bet on more markets

b) move to a subscription model, $X/month sends you mana every day, so you never have to sell positions

Beyond that, clustering/sorting/recommendation has its appeals (still tough to browse the site)

@Gigacasting The daily betting streak kind of solves that problem by giving out mana for participating each day.

One idea for recommendation is just to show related markets at the bottom of the market page, below comments. I'll add that answer!

answered
Section for biggest daily and weekly movements in probability for markets you bet on or saved

(best idea on here, including all markets

High Volatility = interesting for traders and handicappers both)

answered
Bonus M$ for daily betting streak

@3IC BIG fan of this.

answered
Better incentives for creating fun, relatable, controversial markets.

@zoli Awesome, thanks for the thoughts. Agreed.

What do you think these incentives would look like? Today we give out M$10 per unique bettor in markets you create, which works pretty well.