(This was written as an internal memo, but I decided to share!)

Refocusing Manifold

There’s been a lot going on lately:

• Launching Manifold Love

• Running Bet on Love, the musical theatre show

• Launching and unlaunching Manifold Politics as an external site

• Manifund’s Community Round & ACX Grants Round

… in addition to running the normal Manifold Markets site (core product development, The Migration).

But in order to succeed as a business, we should aim to do one thing really well. The Egg-Basket Principle says that a startup should put all their eggs in one basket to achieve maximum impact.

There’s no better time than now to refocus and push for the last bit of growth to hit our target for Series A.

Our main site is in a bit of a growth lull.

But it’s easy to forget that we were stuck at ~100 DAU for the first 9 months of Manifold’s existence.

Today, we are at 1700 DAU. Yeah, we’ve come pretty far!

I think it’s entirely within our power to hit 15k DAU (7-day average) by Oct 1st (7 months and 9 days). That would set us up for Series A before the end of the year.

How can we multiply our DAU? We’ve done it before, and I think it was largely through improving the product. But also, through assimilating other communities (e.g. Destiny).

Here are 6 pillars to build on which should allow us to reach our DAU goal:

• Verticals to bring in new users

  • E.g. US Politics, AI, niche media (e.g. Chess, One Piece), Sports

• New user onboarding

  • Iterate based on user interviews and analytics to make the product clearer and easier to get value from

• Core product

  • E.g. Numeric & Date range market types

  • E.g. Advanced trader mode

  • E.g. Better news dashboards

• Experiments (that could become part of the core product)

  • E.g. Manifold Live mode

  • E.g. Blog

  • E.g. Debate feature

• Viral loops

  • E.g. Share your bet

  • E.g. Ask friends to join your league

• Infra

  • The Migration (off of Firebase)

  • Better site performance

  • Better developer experience

We can do it. Go Manifold!