You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
Manifold.Love is going into maintenance mode while we focus on our core product. We hope to return with improvements once we have more bandwidth; we’re still stoked on the idea of a prediction market-based dating app!
It sounds less like they found it didn’t work, and more like they have other priorities and aren’t (currently) relentlessly pursing this one.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn’t they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
I would guess they tried it because they hoped it would be competitive with their other product, and sunset it because that didn’t happen with the amount of energy they wanted to allocate to the bet. There may also have been an element of updating more about how much focus their core product needed.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
Right. But they were not relentlessly focused on solving this problem.
I straight up don’t believe that that the problems outlined can’t be surmounted, especially if you’re going for a cashflow business instead of an exit.
From their retrospective:
It sounds less like they found it didn’t work, and more like they have other priorities and aren’t (currently) relentlessly pursing this one.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn’t they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
I would guess they tried it because they hoped it would be competitive with their other product, and sunset it because that didn’t happen with the amount of energy they wanted to allocate to the bet. There may also have been an element of updating more about how much focus their core product needed.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
Right. But they were not relentlessly focused on solving this problem.
I straight up don’t believe that that the problems outlined can’t be surmounted, especially if you’re going for a cashflow business instead of an exit.
That’s a PR friendly way of saying that it failed to reach PMF.