Project summary

I aim to overhaul the Manifold onboarding experience to address the high churn rate experienced within the first week of usage. Analysis reveals a crucial link: users who engage in activities like betting, creating markets, or commenting on their first day show a higher tendency to stay active over the long term.

Currently, there's a concerning trend where 90% of new users don't return after creating an account, a rate significantly higher than the industry average. This inefficiency inflates user acquisition costs drastically — it's effectively 10 times higher for retaining a long-term user. Given that Manifold is a platform driven by user-generated content, every user action amplifies the experience for others, making early engagement not just beneficial but essential for the platform's growth.

Project goals

The primary goal is to increase the number of users who remain active after creating an account by:

1. Create a simplified onboarding flow to prompt immediate user interaction, particularly betting on markets. Show users popular markets to bet on an give them a simple YES/NO interface that makes it really easy to get started with their first few bets. Design Concept

2. Identify key user drop-off points and address them with streamlined onboarding.

3. Create a "First Week" engagement checklist to ensure users discover value in Manifold quickly. Design Concept

Funding Allocation

The $3,000 requested is for 20 hours of development work, priced at $150/hour.

• Onboarding Implementation (10 hours): Refine onboarding to prompt immediate user interaction, leveraging data that suggests active first-day users exhibit increased long-term activity.

• Iterative Development Sprints (10 hours): Allocation for two 5-hour increments for targeted mini-projects to address specific retention pain points, like the "First Week" checklist and streamlined user drop-off points.

About Me

I am Case Sandberg, a seasoned developer and designer with 15 year of experience in software engineering across startups, Fortune 500 companies, and various open-source projects. I have a long history of developing both prototypes and fully operational user applications. My prior contributions to the Manifold codebase demonstrate my ability to understand the existing systems and contribute meaningfully as an external developer.

Failure Risks

Potential failure risks include:

• Inadequate understanding of user needs, leading to ineffective solutions.

• Insufficient user engagement with the new onboarding process.

• Resistance from Manifold to make these changes or lack of access to their systems (see below).

Manifold Asks

To ensure the success of this project, I ask Manifold for:

• Permission to A/B test the onboarding module upon reaching a quality threshold.

• Access to Amplitude for real-time data analysis, to ensure my interventions are data-driven.

• Provision of GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS_DEV for application testing in a local development environment.